IPEPA training equips the healthcare workforce to deliver culturally-responsive and safe care to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and their loved ones, who are living with an illness that will shorten the person’s life and lead to death.
IPEPA Learning Approach
IPEPA workshops are delivered by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander facilitators and grounded in the holistic and healing-informed practices of:
- Dadirri – deep listening from a place of quiet, still awareness
- Yarning – free flowing conversation that involves deep listening (dadirri) to storytelling that creates new knowledge and understanding in an environment where all participants feel safe and respected
- Two-way learning – respectful, two-way sharing of knowledge that leads to deeper understanding and truth.
Aunty/Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an Elder from Daly River has given the world a gift by sharing the ancient practice of dadirri. Dadirri is deep listening from a place of quiet, still awareness.
It facilitates deep reflection and contemplation to bring peace, understanding and increased awareness. In this way, we draw on dadirri as the core, underpinning practice of our workshop to manifest rich, genuine two-way learning that reveal pathways to new knowledges.
Yarning is a free-flowing reciprocal conversation that involves deep listening to storytelling that creates new
knowledge and understanding in an environment where all participants feel safe and respected.
It embodies and continues our oral traditions and builds
deep reflection and empathy among those involved. Our workshop draws on this two-way story-telling exchange to translate information in a way that resonates our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing.
In many of our communities, water is a symbol of knowledge and two-way learning can be seen where streams of knowledges combine and lead to deeper understanding and truth. We can draw on this as a metaphor for how Aboriginal knowledge (represented by the fresh water), and Western knowledge (represented by water from the sea) mix with each other to form the creation of new knowledge, generated from the interaction and collaboration of Aboriginal and Western knowledges. There is a mixing of two streams creating a foam that retains individual particles of both fresh and salt water, which continue to carry their own identities and memory. If this foam is cupped roughly in the hands, it evaporates; it must be held gently to reveal its true nature. It is also necessary to be quiet and patient, and to listen deeply to hear the foam’s soft sound which links two-way learning closely to dadirri.
Our workshop is about bringing together the profound wisdom and knowledge of those attending the workshop with the facilitators knowledge of Western concepts, systems and resources in order to find a new knowledge where our people have equitable access to culturally-responsive palliative care.