Beyond Transition: Personal and Social Transformation Through Co-Inquiry Among Military-Connected Students

Kent, Shannon M.; Buechner, Barton

doi:10.1177/0022167819841702

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…It was not feasible for us to evaluate each of these variables individually, but we consider it likely that contextual factors (e.g., group somatic activity, creative expression, the holding of contemplative space, and self-reflection on common elements of lived experience) can work in combination to create the observed phenomenon. Using this framing, Mezirow’s concept of transformative learning may be more helpful than conventional approaches to postservice transition and mental health in terms of addressing combat veterans’ moral injuries (Kent & Buechner, 2019). This approach shifts the focus away from individual mental illness and toward the disorienting effects that result from the moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in liminal war experiences.…”

Section: Case 4: Holistic Retreats For Returning Combat Veteransmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Liminality toCommunitas:The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning

Buechner

Dirkx

Konvisser

et al. 2020

Journal of Transformative Education

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This article addresses a significant gap in the transformative learning literature as it relates to collective transformation, a transformation that is a level beyond individual transformation and is differentiated from the designed and imposed forms of social or organizational change. We consider collective transformation as an emergent and shared worldview shift that is grounded in a shared experience. The participants might not be fully aware of or even able to describe this experience until they engage with it at the interpersonal level. In prior research and practice, the five authors have independently observed and documented the phenomenon of collective transformation among members of marginalized populations who have undergone liminal experiences—forms of disequilibrium that leave individuals betwixt and between. The common thread in these experiences is the emergence of a shared feeling called communitas, which is a deeply felt (yet often temporary) sense of belonging and community. This study’s purpose is to further explore the roles that states of liminality and communitas play in creating the conditions for collective transformation. We draw on several theoretical and practice-based areas of literature and on five particular types of experience. We then examine each case for shared experiences of liminality and communitas as well as for the underlying qualities of self-understanding, relational ability, and a collectively felt sense of new possibilities. This study also includes suggestions for the application of these concepts to other social groups and in other contexts.

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Section: Case 4: Holistic Retreats For Returning Combat Veteransmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Liminality toCommunitas:The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning

Buechner

Dirkx

Konvisser

et al. 2020

Journal of Transformative Education

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“…The Special Issue expresses a wide range of veteran community engagement and collaboration strategies. These areas include (1) arts-based efforts using theater as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (Ali et al, 2019); (2) engaging with military veteran college students in higher education settings (Dobson et al, 2019; Kent & Buechner, 2019); (3) addressing changes in veteran identity in the aftermath of moral injury and integrations between the chaplaincy and psychology (Antal, et al, 2019); (4) activating multisector coalitions in the United States and Canada for collective impact on veterans issues at the community level (Fewster et al, 2019; this foreword); (5) veteran volunteering as a reintegration strategy in civilian life (Matthieu et al, 2019); (6) examining the experiences of military nurses during and after the Korean War as a reflection on country building and the formalization of nursing as profession in both Korea and the United States (Jun et al, 2019); (7) veteran collaboratively designed mindfulness classes in the VA setting (Uebel); (8) engaging veterans in advisory roles with VA health services research (Wendleton et al, 2019); (9) using photovoice as a strategy to increase trust and communication between veterans larger institutions (True et al, 2019); (10) collaborative research on veteran homelessness issues (Nelson et al, 2019); (11) exploring the lived experiences of recent military veterans using psychedelics as a strategy for self-medication (Hooyer, 2020); (12) and engaged strategies for ecological momentary assessment research of alcohol use among veterans in a community based peer support program (Hall et al, 2019); (13) faith-based coalitions to support veteran reintegration hubs (Bennet, et al); and (14) collaborative design of veteran peer support training curricula (Ruffalo, et al, (in press)).…”

Section: Walking the Talk: Collaboratively Building This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Veterans Health and Well-Being—Collaborative Research Approaches: Toward Veteran Community Engagement

Franco

Hooyer

Ruffalo

et al. 2020

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

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Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a designing thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. We briefly describe the activities of this partnership from 2008 to present in order to frame the praxis considerations within this issue. The partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: Arts- and theater-based interventions for PTSD; engaging veteran college students in higher education; combining strengths of the chaplaincy and psychology to address changes in veteran identity after moral injury; multi-sector community coalitions for veteran reintegration in the US and Canada; veteran volunteering as a reintegration strategy; examining experiences of US military nurses; veteran collaboratively designed mindfulness groups in a VA healthcare system; engaging veterans on Community Advisory Boards; using photovoice to highlight veterans issues; collaborative research on veteran homelessness; veteran self-medication with psychedelics; community engaged addictions research; and collaboratively designing veteran peer support curricula. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward assisting and honoring veterans in their transition back into the civilian world.

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“…While many universities have included student veteran support programs to help ease the cultural barriers for veterans coming to higher education, there are few examples of deliberate engagement with the experience of veterans as a part of academic study, or public discourse on campus. The Military Psychology program at Adler University offers one example of this type of military-civilian dialogue being enacted in a multi-disciplinary way, using conceptual models of Adlerian (social systems) psychology along with other heuristic perspectives-including phenomenology and CMM-to study the full range of the military and veterans' culture and experience (Kent and Buechner, 2019). The mixed cohort in this course of study includes veterans, their family members, and professional practitioners, with the result of creating dialogic possibilities about both veterans' experiences and prevailing social issues that are not commonly available in most social or academic settings.…”

Section: Moral Conflict and Mental Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the root of such approaches is an increased awareness of the social construction viewpoint, in which the experience of reality is based upon certain co-constructed or agreed-upon understandings of individual and collective identity and social responsibility. Such approaches include, but are not limited to, Transformative Learning theory, Moral Foundations theory, CMM and Circular Questioning, and Adlerian psychology (Kent and Buechner, 2019).…”

Section: Moral Injury and Moral Healingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ability of individuals to coherently engage in new social contexts or experiences which challenge or conflict with previously accepted norms may depend upon the acquired or developed capacity for interpreting and acting into uncertainty, or liminality by engaging the moral imagination . Such a capacity is more than a matter of modifying cognitive responses, but rather is a shift of perspective or worldview (Kent and Buechner, 2019). Making such a change in perspective is not always based on empirical evidence, which can be selectively interpreted within one's already formed interpretive schemas.…”

Section: Adler Social Construction and The Collective Turn In Healimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Untold Stories of Moral Injury: What We Are Learning—And Not Learning—From Military Veterans in Transition

Buechner

2020

Front. Commun.

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Despite increases in technical capacities for communication, contemporary society struggles with a persistent inability to effectively engage in collective action around a growing number of existential challenges manifesting in local, national, and global contexts. Confronted with environmental deterioration, economic disruptions, wars, and civil unrest, we are challenged to engage in coherent conversations that could lead to collective action, based on a shared understanding. Instead, we are enmeshed in polarized narratives, competing agendas, and emotional conflict. The uneven response to the global COVID-19 pandemic is but the most recent example of this lack of unity. As we seek to find our way in this increasingly complex social landscape, one of the best potential sources for learning about social systems and communication in conflict has gone largely unexamined. For nearly two decades, Military veterans of many nations have struggled while returning from wartime service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite best efforts to welcome these service members home and provide access to educational and health benefits, many of them report a difficulty in relating to fellow citizens and institutions upon their return. One indicator of this sense of alienation is the growing number of suicides among this population, now exceeding the number of casualties of combat service itself. Thwarted ability to communicate with others outside of the military and veterans community, and therefore participate in post-service social life, is increasingly recognized as a significant risk factor for suicide. It has never been easy for military veterans to talk about combat experiences. However, the levels of social isolation we are seeing now points toward a deeper and more systemic issue that is not necessarily connected to specific experiences of combat trauma, but instead rooted in real or perceived cultural and moral misalignments associated with difficult experiences in both service and post-serve transition. The longer term effects of thwarted communication and social isolation of veterans, or the feeling of not fitting in can lead to further damage to the underlying moral structures, manifesting as moral conflict (Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997) or moral injuries (Shay, 2014). These moral injuries may include perceived personal failings or culpability based on specific combat experiences, or more generally, a sense of futility in the political limitations of military missions, or perceived betrayals of trust by those in authority. Additionally, stressors and misalignments in the transition process around homecoming are likely as much of a factor as combat experience in creating moral injuries. Many veterans point to a lack of shared values and principles among citizens, and within social institutions and media, as one reason for the difficulty of post-service reintegration. Moral injuries in this sense have further existential implications, with important (but often unheard) messages for our entire society. These are not simple issues that can be addressed by our current array of social work or clinical interventions, or by altering narratives and messages. Rather, they demand a full and interdisciplinary engagement in collective assessment and meaning-making at the society level. As a way of inviting communication scholars into this conversation, I present several models drawn from the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) Theory (Pearce, 2007) to look at the way that moral conflict and moral injuries are made or socially constructed in misaligned communication between returning service members and families, institutions, and others at both the population level and in community settings. Mental health implications are drawn Adlerian psychology, a body of psychological theory that is intersubjectively oriented, and shares a relational or social constructionist orientation with CMM. I then discuss the significance of these intersections in communication and mental health theory and practice, and implications for looking more closely at social connections and communication as key components of well-being and coherence.

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Beyond Transition: Personal and Social Transformation Through Co-Inquiry Among Military-Connected Students

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

From Liminality toCommunitas:The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning

From Liminality toCommunitas:The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning

Veterans Health and Well-Being—Collaborative Research Approaches: Toward Veteran Community Engagement

Untold Stories of Moral Injury: What We Are Learning—And Not Learning—From Military Veterans in Transition

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