Chris Heape

This chapter describes how improvised participatory theatre can be used to encourage change in professional healthcare practice. It focuses on chronic pain, with a brief example from another healthcare project. The principal interest is to demonstrate how theatre processes, for the most carried out as participatory workshops, can be used to explore and influence healthcare practice. The chapter shows how health and illness narratives can be considered temporal, improvised, and performative phenomena that are narrated to life through actual practice. The idea is that narratives of practice emerge from the dynamic, moment-to-moment, and reflexive engagement with actual practice rather than as idealized or generalized accounts about practice. The emphasis is therefore on engendering narratives of practice as a narrating-between-people in a situation as opposed to considering narratives as after-the-fact accounts.

Tourism is a global social and economic phenomenon, which calls for a holistic approach to tourism higher education, where the broader aims of the industry and society are explicitly addressed. The indispensable complexity of the tourism phenomenon demands professionals with a far-reaching and integrated understanding of the multiple disciplines and paradigms that are concerned with sustainable tourism development and adaptive management. Rather than resting on predefined learning outcomes, where students simply acquire knowledge about sustainable tourism development, this chapter unfolds the processes of how complex and critical understandings of sustainable tourism development are collaboratively designed with students, tutors and teachers.

Healthcare practitioners are often presented with vulnerable encounters where their professional experience is insufficient when dealing with patients who suffer from illnesses such as chronic pain. How can one otherwise understand chronic pain and develop practices whereby medical healthcare practitioners can experience alternative ways of doing their practice? This essay describes how a group of researchers have, over a number of years, developed improvised participatory theatre as a means of engaging healthcare practitioners, patients and other lay people in situations where it is legitimate to reappraise their practice and reunderstand the nature of an illness such as chronic pain. One conclusion was to consider that it is a relational rather than an individual phenomenon that in turn demands alternative practice. Through iterative workshop processes of improvised theatre, participants are encouraged to experience the vulnerable, the unknown, and the need to be alternatively present when dealing with patients whose situation is imbued with suffering.