Steven co-developed the Story-Sharing methodology foundational to the work of the Partnership Development Grant (the pilot project) and the current Partnership Grant. He supervises the project’s research assistants based out of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. He is currently co-authoring a manuscript on the impacts of story-sharing. Our Project Administrator Anna Adjemian spoke with Steven about his involvement in the project and his personal, political, and professional connections to SBNH.
Anna Adjemian: Please give us a short background/summary of who you are and what you do professionally.
Steven High: I am a professor of history at Concordia University, specializing in oral history – thinking about the ways that history inhabits each of us, our families, our communities, our workplaces. I’m originally from Thunder Bay, a small resource city in Northern Ontario. I come from a working-class background, and that has informed my approach to research.
I’ve been doing oral history for a long time, and oral history is about story-sharing. One of the ideas is that by sharing stories, we can help with social regeneration; in the context of division or rupture, where there are few connections between people, by sharing stories you personalize, you make people care for each other. My early work was focused around mass violence and genocide, how that violence ripples outwards through people’s lives and the lives of families and communities. Yet it’s living history – there’s a lot of joy and happiness and laughter in these interviews that are at the same time very difficult.
Why did you get involved with this project?
I had a student who went on to do a nursing degree and met Laurie [Gottlieb] and connected us. We started talking about the ways that sharing stories might contribute to Strengths-Based Nursing and bringing about cultural change within workplaces that often have strong hierarchies and a lot of pressure. This appealed to me. My daughter is severely disabled, and we have a lot of face-time with the health sector; in particular children’s hospitals. The first iteration of this project, the pilot, was focused on children’s hospitals. That was something that was close to my heart. I’ve certainly seen first-hand the remarkable work that nurses do every day.
What does SBNH mean to you?
For me, this comes from a personal place as much as a professional place, and I think that’s a good thing. A project like ours that has such a diversity of people, a diversity of locations, offers something important to research. It is a strength in and of itself. In a large collaborative project you need people who are open, flexible, and generous; who work well with others; who can listen as well as speak. We are coming at it from different disciplinary places, different locations, but there is the shared ethos that unites us.
Instead of reducing people to a problem that needs to be fixed, we think of shared humanity. To find strength and to think about resilience – it’s humanizing as a frame to think about healthcare. There are challenges; when you have institutional structures in the healthcare system that are essentially extractive, where nurses are pushed beyond their abilities, where there is more work than time – how do you reconcile the philosophical ethos of SBNH with institutional structures that are its opposite? I think culture change is a big part of the answer. That’s how structures change, that’s how you build political will. It’s not a magic wand; it’s something that society has to work for. I see this as a long road. But the ethos is to me a guiding light. It provides a shared language in terms of what this alternative might be, and a basis for action.
What does this project mean to you/what do you hope to see come out of your work on this project?
In the pilot phase of the project, we developed methodology in the context of Holland Bloorview [Kids Rehabilitation Hospital]. We wanted the process to be embedded in a place and grounded in a context. We thought a lot about how to integrate the nurses themselves into the process, and how we might meld filmmaking and digital storytelling with a more reflexive space around interviewing, life-storying, a wider context. We thought about what’s added when we create spaces for personal exchange in a workplace where there is usually professional distance. Often when we interview people the relationship is between the interviewee and interviewer – that personal consent is really important. Moving into an institutional context, there are layers of complication and complexity, and of course politics.
In the second phase, COVID struck and this embedded storytelling work that we had refined, developed, and proposed to SSHRC was impossible. We returned to the pilot interviews – that was a way to ensure that we were continuing to learn from all the reflection and documentation that was done in that first phase. From an oral history standpoint, there is a lot of work in the academy around personal story, with an underlying belief that [sharing stories] matters, that it does things. I’m a firm believer that it does, I’ve seen it; but we haven’t documented it. If we can document it, and the reception, what happens next, it has big ramifications.
It’s very difficult to measure change in these ways when it is about a cultural shift. It’s almost like sedimentation, cumulative over time. If we can measure that SBNH is actually doing good, that makes it harder and harder for those who support the extractive kind of structure. I see this as a political project. The pandemic changes the issues to some extent, and makes some of this work of even more national significance. Nurses are on the front line, and their experience during this past year is an important part of Canadian history now. It’s still unfolding, and it’s something that needs to be documented and remembered. I think this is an opportunity to showcase the extraordinary in the ordinary. People have extraordinary lives, and ordinary healthcare workers do extraordinary things every day. I’ve seen this first hand with my daughter. Now we get the opportunity as a country to realize it more. Our project, I hope, will be able to contribute to that.
Hear Steven further discuss his work, after he was awarded the 2020 Governor General's History Award for Popular Media:
https://www.canadashistory.ca/awards/governor-general-s-history-awards/a...