Impressions of Uses for Visual Thinking Strategies Among Doctorate of Nursing Practice Leadership Students

Purpose:  Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a structured art viewing technique that can help students develop aesthetic understanding and critical thinking skills (Housen, 2002). VTS integrates many techniques to build cognition including fact-finding, questioning, speculating, and personal association (Yenawine, 1997). Originally used with children, there is now a growing recognition that VTS holds value in higher education (Moorman, & Hensel, 2016). In the field of Nursing, undergraduate students have reported that VTS helps create a safe learning environment and helps the see things differently. (Moorman, 2015). Other undergraduate students have reported that VTS helped them gain observational, cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills (Moorman, Hensel, Decker, & Busby, 2016). Very little is known about how VTS might be used among nurses in leadership and administrative positions. The purpose of this project was to explore perceptions of how nurses enrolled in a Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) program thought they might use VTS in their practice.

Methods:  Fourteen DNP students, enrolled in a leadership DNP, participated in a standard VTS session lead by a trained facilitator. The group viewed three works of art and then were asked three open ended questions: 1. What is going on in this picture? 2. What are you seeing that makes you say that? and 3. What more can you find? Following the session the participants provided written feedback to open ended questions: 1.What was your impression of Visual Thinking Strategies? and 2. How might you use Visual Thinking Strategies in your Nursing or leadership?All participants gave written consent to use de-identified data for research purposes. Data were analyzed using the qualitative descriptive approach described by Sandelowski (2000) with Dedoose Version 7.5 software.

Results:  The VTS session was well received as being enjoyable and having applications for practice. Three themes emerged about how participants might use VTS: as a teaching tool (N=13), changing thinking in practice (N=7), and facilitating interpersonal relations (N=14).

Conclusion:  Thinking “out of the box” is becoming increasingly important for nurses to deal with complexity in today’s health care health care environment. This study found DNP students felt VTS could be used as a tool to improve communication and critical thinking in practice and education. Future research should address how skills learned in VTS improve nursing practice.