Enacting narrative pedagogy. The lived experiences of students and teachers.

ABSTRACT Reforming nursing education to meet contemporary challenges in educational and clinical environments is needed through the development and implementation of new pedagogies. Nancy Diekelmann is advancing the science of nursing education by describing a new phenomenological pedagogy, Narrative Pedagogy, identified through interpretive research in nursing education. Narrative Pedagogy is an approach to reforming nurs ing education that is always site specific and not generalizable from school to school. However, the processes of Narrative Pedagogy are transferable and can be enacted in many contexts.This study describes the common experiences and shared meanings of teachers and students engaging in or enacting Narrative Pedagogy. Diekelmann gathered seven teachers and students in five schools of nursing in four midwestern states to share their experiences. Interpretive phenomenology was used to analyze the group interview. One of the findings identified during this analysis, Enacting Narrative Pedagogy, is explicated, and two themes, Decentering Skill Acquisition and Content and Attending to the Practices of Thinking, are described. INSIGHTS GLEANED FROM EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH (1,2) demonstrate that new pedagogies offer substantive ideas toward reforming learning climates and improving the relationships (partnerships) engendered between students and faculty (3-7). At a time when the profession faces a most serious shortage (8), nursing education must remain inviting and engaging, not isolating and competitive or outdated (9-11). The need for new research-based pedagogies for nursing education has never been greater. * Extant research reveals that the legacy of a generation of teacher-centered conventional pedagogies - outcomes or competency-- based education, critical thinking frameworks, and problem-based learning produces learning climates in schools of nursing that are isolating and competitive (12-16). Students report that fear, anger, and anxiety characterize their relationships with faculty (17-I9). A study conducted by N. Diekelmann (15) indicates that in many nursing schools, students are "on strike," evidenced by their use of resistance, silence, nonperformance, lateness, and absence. * THE NEW PEDAGOGIES - critical, feminist, phenomenological, and postmodern discourse -- focus specifically on improving the learning climates or communities that students and faculty cocreate (20). These pedagogies offer new ways of thinking about taken-for-granted practices, strategies, and assumptions of teaching and learning. When attention focuses on engendering community and improving learning climates, student learning and participation in their schooling increase (21). This article reports on a study that describes the lived experiences of students and teachers enacting or engaging in Narrative Pedagogy, a research-based pedagogy developed within the discipline of nursing. The New Language of Concernful Practices of Schooling, Learning, and Teaching In a 12-year study of the lived experiences of teachers and students in nursing, N. Diekelmann (16,22,23) identified the Concernful Practices of Schooling, Learning, Teaching. (See Sidebar 1.) These practices describe the recurring patterns, common meanings, and shared experiences of schooling, learning, and teaching nursing. As such, they are not teaching strategies, but "offer new and substantive understandings for reflective practice that are directed towards caring, dialogue and practice in nursing" (22). The Concernful Practices provide students and teachers in nursing education with a new language. They provide a language other than the conventional language of outcomes education that emphasizes skill mastery and knowledge acquisition. Thus, these practices encourage teachers and students to explore the meanings and significances and to think in new ways about learning experiences. As part of assuring quality and rigor in her work, N. Diekelmann returned her findings - the interpreted narratives explicating the Concernful Practices - to study participants, asking them to review the data and her interpretations. …