Discomfort Spurs Growth

Pacific University’s ongoing partnership with York St. John University of the United Kingdom continues to result in significant collaboration between faculty members of each institution.

This fall, Dr. Hannah Spring, a senior lecturer at York St. John, brought her experience in library sciences and health informatics to help the Pacific University Libraries develop instruction materials and other resources, and the School of Occupational Therapy evaluate its capstone and evidence-based practice curriculum.

Spring’s unique role at York as a clinical librarian who teaches full time within the university’s health sciences program provided Pacific faculty with a strong, evidence-based knowledge set to draw from throughout the month of October.

Over a four-week period, Spring worked on a number of projects, including collaborating with OT faculty to provide input and feedback on the structure of the school’s doctorate capstone. She spent time with the Libraries faculty, observing instruction sessions, reviewing health literacy instructional materials and visiting the health sciences libraries at OHSU and the University of Washington. Spring was also interested in learning more about the Libraries’ institutional repository and journal publishing program.

Additionally, Spring shared her latest research with Pacific pharmacy and public health students related to media representation of health stories and the effects this can have on healthcare, information behavior, and society.

Spring’s time with Pacific’s Occupational Therapy faculty is just the latest in a number of collaborations between the School of OT and York St. John that include co-authored research papers, publications and presentations. For both institutions, the collaboration is equally beneficial.

Most recently, Pacific professor Linda Hunt and York’s Caroline Wolverson co-authored “Work and the Older Person: Increasing Longevity and Well-Being,” a guide for healthcare providers and family members of the young at heart. Spring credited Pacific’s John White for helping foster the opportunity for her to come out to Pacific. The two met while White was visiting York last year.

Soon after that meeting, White contacted Pacific University Librarian Marita Kunkel about the possibility of Spring visiting Pacific to share her expertise.  Kunkel enthusiastically followed up and plans for the visit were developed over the winter and spring. The resulting one-month visit for Spring is the longest of any of the exchanges between the two universities thus far, allowing Spring to contribute in a multitude of ways.

Spring and Pacific’s OT faculty explored the differences between the Pacific’s capstone format and York’s dissertation model. While Pacific’s stretches throughout the three-year program, York’s is an intense, single-year format that transpires over its program’s final year.

The candid exchange of ideas, she said, will be highly beneficial in enhancing the capstones at both universities.

“The end goal of both program capstones is for students to implement evidence-based practice in specialized areas of OT,” Spring said. “There are things that we can do better at York, and perhaps that Pacific can do better as well. This exchange is about learning from each other and supporting each other’s development."

Spring has just taken on the leadership of York’s dissertation module, and said she will likely consider implementing some of the things she has learned here at Pacific.

“There are certainly things of Pacific’s capstone project that we can take as examples of good practice to apply,” she said. “It’s quite timely and will be really valuable for my work next year.”

Spring’s pursuit for perennial growth stems from her will to stretch herself physically and mentally. Seven years ago, she took part in a charity skydiving event to benefit the British Red Cross.

She enjoyed it so much that she became licensed and now averages two jumps per weekend from twin-otter aircraft flying at about 15,000 feet. To date, she has taken more than 300 jumps from drop zones in the UK.

“I’m an adventurer and have a need to take myself out my comfort zone,” Spring notes. “I think it is quite good for people to do that.”

Spring enjoys the comradarie with fellow jumpers. “There are only five or six thousand skydivers the entire UK out of a total population of about 65 million, so we are a rare breed.”

Given the rigors of her career, Spring believes the adrenaline rush from jumping actually has a calming effect.

“Work situations can be pressurizing,” she said. “(Skydiving) helps me handle life better. It’s quite an amazing thing to be able to do, and it helps me ‘switch off’. If you can jump out of a plane, you start to feel like you can do anything.”

Spring’s latest growth chapter has come in the form of dance, something she has enjoyed since childhood when she began ballet. A little more than a year ago, she began performing cabaret throughout Britain with a collective known as Black Box Productions. She also started producing independent performances for promoters.

“I have absolutely terrible stage fright (of performing)," she said. "It's way more frightening than skydiving. Again, it’s this thing about taking myself out of my comfort zone. It’s about trying to put yourself into situations where you have to perform under pressure. I see it as good training. What do you do when something goes wrong? A costume malfunction, or falling over in the middle of a performance? You have to be able to cope.”

Part of coping, Spring says, is to honestly assess things on a regular basis to prevent stagnation and complacency. Faculty exchange programs that are a hallmark of the collaboration between Pacific and York St. John are driven in large part by just that: a willingness to assess, adjust and move forward.