Using Mandala Art to Improve Practice

The current featured article in ANS is titled Something Is Going to Happen Here The Use of Mandala Art in Enhancing Reflective Practice, authored by Kathleen Quinn, EdD, MED, MSN, RN. In this article, Dr. Quinn describes the use of mandalas as part of a reflective practice journaling process used in universities, colleges and hospitals. We welcome your comments and responses to this article; it is available at no cost while it is featured.  Here is a message from Dr. Quinn about her work:

This mandala demonstrates the focus of the journal article “Something is going to happen here….” And it is a great place to begin thinking about your practice and the organization where you work.

This article for ANS is based on a “sliver” of a communications and development program called Discovery Process and Discovery Communications. This program, developed over thirty years of practice and service, is used in higher education nursing and interprofessional education, in hospitals to mitigate errors and develop staff and administrators for retention. It has been utilized in community-based clinics and direct patient care. It has also been used to transform secondary and elementary faculty and programs in private, parochial and public schools.

Dr. Quinn presenting a workshop on the Discovery Process to the Mississippi Nurses Association Annual Conference in Biloxi, October 2018.

Customarily, we are invited into institutions, schools, departments of nursing, allied health and interprofessional programs. We are asked to consult for transformation of personnel, curriculum and programs, accreditation. Part of our work is to support transformation and expansion of programs which are in need of being changed or streamlined; using Discovery Processes for growing new and current faculty to meet shortages of faculty and administrators with the huge number of qualified nursing school applicants. We work with classroom and active learning approaches to improve the educational experience and the workplace environment. We do the same work with individual schools at the elementary and secondary level. Discovery Schools has been doing this work for more than thirty years.

The Discovery Process for Development requires a collaborative approach between Administrators, Faculty and the consultants. The Discovery Process entails an approach where there is a collaborative assessment of needs and a collaborative process for creating the solutions. This very simply means every program is customized using this process. There is an existing framework for the process and then it is adapted to each school’s unique needs. Discovery is not a cookie cutter approach, nor is it imposed from the perspective of an expert having all the answers.

For more information about this work, visit my web site.