Jo-Ann M MacDonald

... E. Rennick b g & Joseph Cox h i Available online: 12 Aug 2011. ... 200514. Hampton, M., Fahlman, S., Goertzen, J. and Jeffrey, B. 2005. A process evaluation of the Youth Educating About Health (Yeah) Program: A peer-designed and peer led sexual health education program. ...

In this article we report on qualitative findings that describe public health practitioners’ practice-based definitions of evidence-informed decision making (EIDM) and communities of practice (CoP), and how CoP could be a mechanism to enhance their capacity to practice EIDM. Our findings emerged from a qualitative descriptive analysis of group discussions and participant concept maps from two consensus-building workshops that were conducted with public health practitioners ( N = 90) in two provinces in eastern Canada. Participants recognized the importance of EIDM and the significance of integrating explicit and tacit evidence in the EIDM process, which was enhanced by CoP. Tacit knowledge, particularly from peers and personal experience, was the preferred source of knowledge, with informal peer interactions being the favored form of CoP to support EIDM. CoP helped practitioners build relationships and community capacity, share and create knowledge, and build professional confidence...

Encouraging youth voice, visibility, and active participation in adolescent-related research is strongly advocated in the literature. In this article, we describe how participatory approaches informed by arts-based methods (e.g., reflective writing, dramatization) were used with adolescents to enhance the research process in an exploratory study designed to develop and evaluate prevention resources for sexual risk-taking behaviors.Youth aged 15 to 17 years participated in iterative focus groups conducted over a 1-year period in school settings in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Descriptions of our experiences, strategies, and insights provide evidence for guiding practice to optimize adolescent participation in research.

Is there a contemporary role for the lay public to mentor nursing students? Nurse mentors are experts who listen, affirm, advise, guide, and encourage student or novice nurses to develop their expertise and plan their career path. A mentoring relationship provides a mechanism for sharing knowledge, shaping professional nursing identity, and developing the talents of nurses, implicitly suggesting an older mentor and a younger learner. Moreover, the relationship increases job satisfaction and personal and professional growth for both. Extending the benefits of the professional mentor to the lay mentor, we decided to have elders be mentors to our novice nursing students. Elders have many assets that may be deployed in a purposeful way to share knowledge, facilitate learning, and begin to shape the professional identity of nursing students. With the accumulated wisdom of years of day-to-day living, elders are a rich source of knowledge about life, living, aging, and managing health and well-being. Their reflections on life may constitute significant learning opportunities for many nursing students not exposed to such knowledge through previous experience or extended family; it has the potential to change students’ perceptions of aging and the aging process. Elders are experienced healthcare consumers who have learned how to develop and maintain a relationship with a healthcare provider. This knowledge can be conveyed in tacit ways to nursing students through a mentoring relationship. Prosocial behaviors, such as warmth, friendliness, and respect, help the student appreciate the importance of these affective elements for developing and evolving a relationship. Expectations of the nurse and boundaries of a professional relationship may also be tacitly conveyed. Many elders have the time and are willing to make a commitment to a 1-to-1 mentoring relationship with a nursing student for a period of time. The mentoring relationship also has the potential to benefit elders by affirming their life history and facilitating integration of life course events. Some suggest that teaching and learning situations promote the expression of an elder’s legacy.