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Learning Objective 1: describe the importance of a disorienting experience in transformative learning.
Learning Objective 2: explain how to apply transformative strategies to clinical nursing education.
Transformative learning is predicated on a disorienting experience (Mezirow, 1991). The intense demands on the nursing professionals were very dramatic and disorienting. I was fortunate to have a wise and compassionate department chair scaffolding experiences so I could adapt to my new role. By the time I escorted my third clinical rotation to the hospital, I had realizations that caused me to reflect on how to incorporate my own transformative learning experiences with two prior clinical groups. Embracing Benner’s (2010) call for radical transformation in nursing education, I engaged this third group in the “process of formation” which inspires the change in self-identity from acting as a lay person reciting clinical information to becoming a professional capable of using clinical reasoning and imagination. Reflecting this transformation, I realized other strategies were instrumental in this transformation:
- helping students manage the change process from acting like a nurse to becoming a nurse;
- expanding students’ worldview to be more comprehensive in their analysis of the patient ;
- providing a supportive context, engaging two of Benner’s strategies, being with students and using the wisdom of the group.
I realized that by taking students on their transformative journey, I was engaging in my own change process. My teaching transitioned to what Benner (2010) refers to as the signature pedagogy of nursing, that of situated coaching or teaching by example so students learn through practice, much as the department chair had done for me.