Maria Francesca Freda - Böcker

Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education: Fostering Inclusion through Narration and Reflexivity presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationships between narrative devices and reflexivity in higher education. Stemming from a collaborative European research project called INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn), it focuses on an innovative model aimed at promoting personal resources and reflective competencies in non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students. The book is divided into three parts, with the first providing an exploration of the key theoretical issues that formed the basis of the theoretical and methodological approaches in the INSTALL Project. The second part presents an innovative narrative methodology and discusses the most significant phases of the training process and of the main products. The third and last part provides a broad discussion of higher education policies and of the need to encourage innovation and reforms to improve the academic inclusion of underachieving students. Chapters in the collection examine interventions in Italy, Romania, Ireland and Spain, using a broad transnational, intercultural and comparative approach, to consider narrative tools using four channels: metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and the body.This book provides theoretical insights and practical methodologies which can be used to enhance quality teaching and innovation, as well as to help adapt to diversity in higher education. It will, therefore, be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education; sociology of education; education policy and politics; cultural and developmental psychology; and narrative research, as well as to those studying counselling, mentoring and coaching

Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education: Fostering Inclusion through Narration and Reflexivity presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationships between narrative devices and reflexivity in higher education. Stemming from a collaborative European research project called INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn), it focuses on an innovative model aimed at promoting personal resources and reflective competencies in non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students. The book is divided into three parts, with the first providing an exploration of the key theoretical issues that formed the basis of the theoretical and methodological approaches in the INSTALL Project. The second part presents an innovative narrative methodology and discusses the most significant phases of the training process and of the main products. The third and last part provides a broad discussion of higher education policies and of the need to encourage innovation and reforms to improve the academic inclusion of underachieving students. Chapters in the collection examine interventions in Italy, Romania, Ireland and Spain, using a broad transnational, intercultural and comparative approach, to consider narrative tools using four channels: metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and the body.This book provides theoretical insights and practical methodologies which can be used to enhance quality teaching and innovation, as well as to help adapt to diversity in higher education. It will, therefore, be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education; sociology of education; education policy and politics; cultural and developmental psychology; and narrative research, as well as to those studying counselling, mentoring and coaching

The concept of health is a challenge of great complexity in terms of theoretical, methodological and intervention within the idiographic frame.Health cannot be considered an abstract condition, but a means, a resource aimed at achieving objectives that relate to the ability of people to lead their lives in a productive way - individually, socially, and economically. Health is a process that is not based on the definition of standards and categories on the basis of which typifying the states of health. Rather, it has to be considered a process, on a large scale and on many entangled levels, aimed at generating a culture of the health as a resource for individuals and communities and to promote skills needed to transform these resources into developmental goals.The notion of health, indeed, defined and interpreted in terms of "state" and not of process, meets the immediate paradox of being an indicator of normativity by reason of which we risk a proliferation of new and potentially infinite forms of "deviation". The approach of the idiographic sciences (see previous volumes of the Yearbook Idiographic Science Series, by same publisher IAP) considers that every psychological process (but in general every process, from organic to the social and cultural ones) is characterized by a contextual, situated and contingent dynamics. That dynamics is always characterized by a never-ending opening of its cycles and great variability. Conditions of stagnation and hypostatization are characteristic of all forms of disease (physical, mental and social) that sclerotize relational links between people and their environments. Health is therefore a process that presents oscillation in the same way of any developmental process that has moments of crisis and rupture in order to re-organize new forms of relationship with the social and cultural environment.This book represent a fruitful way to deep many cogent issues and to dialogue with an idiographic perspective in order to discuss the concept of health, to define its cultural meanings and possible polysemy (e.g., wellness, care, hygiene, quality of life, resilience, prevention, healing, deviation/normality, subjective potentiality for development, etc.), its areas of pertinence and intervention (somatic, psychological, social) trying to offer possible alternatives to the "normalization" of health and creating new incentives for the reflection.

The concept of health is a challenge of great complexity in terms of theoretical, methodological and intervention within the idiographic frame.Health cannot be considered an abstract condition, but a means, a resource aimed at achieving objectives that relate to the ability of people to lead their lives in a productive way - individually, socially, and economically. Health is a process that is not based on the definition of standards and categories on the basis of which typifying the states of health. Rather, it has to be considered a process, on a large scale and on many entangled levels, aimed at generating a culture of the health as a resource for individuals and communities and to promote skills needed to transform these resources into developmental goals.The notion of health, indeed, defined and interpreted in terms of "state" and not of process, meets the immediate paradox of being an indicator of normativity by reason of which we risk a proliferation of new and potentially infinite forms of "deviation". The approach of the idiographic sciences (see previous volumes of the Yearbook Idiographic Science Series, by same publisher IAP) considers that every psychological process (but in general every process, from organic to the social and cultural ones) is characterized by a contextual, situated and contingent dynamics. That dynamics is always characterized by a never-ending opening of its cycles and great variability. Conditions of stagnation and hypostatization are characteristic of all forms of disease (physical, mental and social) that sclerotize relational links between people and their environments. Health is therefore a process that presents oscillation in the same way of any developmental process that has moments of crisis and rupture in order to re-organize new forms of relationship with the social and cultural environment.This book represent a fruitful way to deep many cogent issues and to dialogue with an idiographic perspective in order to discuss the concept of health, to define its cultural meanings and possible polysemy (e.g., wellness, care, hygiene, quality of life, resilience, prevention, healing, deviation/normality, subjective potentiality for development, etc.), its areas of pertinence and intervention (somatic, psychological, social) trying to offer possible alternatives to the "normalization" of health and creating new incentives for the reflection.

The book deals with current issues, pertinent every healthcare relationship. Changes in medicine as well as some constant aspects over time arise within a cultural ground and generate new questions and issues that are not only purely medical, but also bioethical, social, political, economic and psychological of course.On the one hand, changes in medicine generate new questions for society, on the other hand, the society poses new questions to the medicine, new challenges, and in some cases they can conflict with consolidated models and practices. Never the progress of Western medicine and its therapeutic practices have been as significant as in the last decades but the increase of specific competence and effectiveness of medical treatments are not linearly translated into an increase of consensus, dialogue and alliance between medicine and society. How does psychology take on a position of interlocutor towards medicine and its transformations? How does Cultural Psychology, Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology confront themselves with the processes of meaning making generated by medicine?The interest of the book is aimed to grasp the construction of processes of cultural, relational and subjective meaning in the dialogical encounter between medicine and society, between doctor and patient. The book intends to focus in particular on two specific plans: on the one hand, to present a reflection and analysis on contemporary medicine and its on-going transformations of the healthcare relationship; on the other hand, to present and discuss experiences of intervention and possible models of intervention addressed to healthcare and doctor-patient relationships during its crucial steps (consultation, formulation and communication of diagnosis, therapy, conclusion). The book’s purposes are aimed to discuss crucial and current issues on the borders between medicine and psychology: consensus and sharing, decision-making and autonomy, subjectivity and narration, emotions and affectivity, medical semeiotics and cultural semiotics, training of physicians, and epistemological, theoretical and methodological issues.