Paper
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Exploring the use of narrative pedagogy in teaching caring concepts
Engle Angela Chan, PhD, School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
| Learning Objective #1: appreciate the way students' caring values were recovered or consolidated through narrative pedagogy. |
| Learning Objective #2: identify that a meaningful caring curriculum is about how students learn about themselves and their caring practice. |
While caring is an integral part in nursing, the reality of caring in practice within the continued dominance of a biomedical context in Hong Kong remains an issue. The purpose of this study is to explore how narrative pedagogy helps nursing students to recover or to consolidate their caring concepts and to translate them into their practice.
A qualitative study, based on focus group interviews, was conducted. The findings reveal that caring is not only a professional attribute but also a narrative experience of personal knowing for the students. Caring evolves as students’ nursing experience accumulated and the process reflects how they continue to live and grow in caring. Reflexivity that involves self awareness, critical scrutiny and conscious participation is central to competent, theoretical nursing practice. Nursing practice without the theoretical guide will ultimately overshadow caring with the invisible routines that are all too familiar for the nurses to question and will hence lead to a perpetuation of the tension between the espoused caring values and the enacted caring actions.