Nursing Education and of Implementation Interpretive Pedagogies, Phenomenology and Narrative Pedagogy
Interpretive Pedagogies Theory in Nursing Education, Phenomenology and Implementation In /nursing Education, Premise of Phenomenology In Nursing Education, Phenomenology Implications for Nursing Education, Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education, Premise of Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education, Implications of Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education.
Interpretive Pedagogies Theory in Nursing Education
Interpretive pedagogies focus on exploring, deconstructing, and critiquing experiences. They embrace multiple epistemologies, ways of knowing, and practices of thinking (Diekelmann, 2001). The pedagogies are methods to use when the educational emphasis is to understand or appreciate the nature of experience.
The interpretive pedagogies empower the student, decenter authority, encourage social action, and construct new knowledge. Two interpretive pedagogies are discussed here: phenomenology and narrative pedagogy.
Phenomenology and Implementation In /nursing Education
Phenomenology is a philosophy and a qualitative research method nurse educators use to study the lived human experience. It is an inductive, descriptive approach used to explain the phenomenon of the human experience (Omery, 1983).
Phenomenology is concerned with communicating understandings of meanings of phenomena and offers multiple approaches to examine problems at any system level. It involves reflection and discourse through a dialogue of language and experience of caring about phenomena from which meanings are transformed into themes that capture the phenomenon that one is trying to understand (Van Manen, 1990).
When applied in nursing education and clinical practice, phenomenology can be used to gain understanding of the phenomena that are the focus of nursing in clinical practice. The phenomenon of concern of nursing includes nurses themselves as students and practitioners and, of course, their patients. The concerns include, but are not limited to, human experiences such as pain, suffering, loss, grief, and hope (Taylor, 1993).
Premise of Phenomenology In Nursing Education
Phenomenology offers a way to describe the nature of nursing practice in current practice settings; It is a flexible and fluid pedagogy that is situated in the entire universe of professional nursing as viewed through a holistic lens. This view enables perception of the gestalt of the lived experience of nurses and patients.
The physical and social environments merge into a personal, intimate, and holistic experience. A phenomenological approach establishes a view that shifts the focus from a technical, skills orientation to one that is concerned with the whole human being.
Phenomenology has been used by nursing scholars such as Benner (1984), Tanner et al. (1993), Bevis (1989), and Diekelmann (2001). The goal of phenomenology is to understand human experience the how’s and whys in which events are experienced.
Phenomenology Implications for Nursing Education
Phenomenology can be used in the classroom; in clinical practice; and in any other situation in which patients, nurses, and nursing students are the phenomena of interest. Faculty and students have unique opportunities to gain knowledge and learn new skills from all subjects.
Patients, expert clinicians, students, and faculty all have a story to unfold. Phenomenology clearly recognizes the value of the students in making meaning out of stories while promoting trust, creativity, and inquiry. These learning experiences have the potential to promote a more in depth understanding and enhance the caring aspects of students’ clinical practice.
When using a phenomenological approach to teaching, faculty select phenomena from professional literature that is relevant to the course content and explore them in the classroom. Faculty can also demonstrate ways in which aspects of a patient’s or nurse’s lived experience can be elicited through the use of open ended and probing questions.
Guest speakers may enhance classroom learning experience by sharing their own personal knowledge of the lived experience of patients or themselves. Faculty can use a variety of teaching–learning strategies, including clarified nursing perspectives, nursing prose, logs, case studies, anecdotal recordings, dialogue, fictional and autobiographical accounts of experience, responses to art, and artistic expression.
In clinical practice settings, expert nurse clinicians are active in the learning process. Faculty guide and show students how to learn from the expert clinician. Faculty assume responsibility for identifying, negotiating, and collaborating with the expert clinicians who guide and mentor students’ learning experiences in clinical practice.
In addition, faculty initiate discussion and debate, offer critiques without judgments, and guide the agenda without controlling it. Faculty become listeners and respond and enter into dialogues with students.
The climate provides opportunities for students to become empowered. The role of the student is to make meaning out of information. Students must be self-directed in seeking out what they want and need to learn from the expert clinician or faculty.
Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education
Narrative pedagogy uses conventional, phenomenological, critical, and feminist pedagogies. Narrative pedagogy is a commitment to practical discourse in which knowledge is gained through the experiences of teachers, students, and clinicians. It is the collective interpretation of common experience that encourages shared learning.
It is not intended to replace other types of teaching but has true application as a complementary pedagogy in nursing courses (Walsh, 2011). A 12-year study produced nine themes from interview texts obtained from teachers, students, and clinicians (Diekelmann, 2001).
The experience of learning and teaching is articulated in the common and shared experiences of what is really important in nursing education. The Concertful practices of schooling, learning, teaching outlined by Diekelmann (2001, p. 57) are as follows:
• Gathering: Bringing in and calling forth
• Creating places: Keeping open a future of possibilities
• Assembling: Constructing and cultivating
• Staying: Knowing and connecting
• Caring: Engendering community
• Interpreting: Unlearning and becoming
• Presenting: Attending and being open
• Preserving: Reading, writing, thinking, and dialoguing
• Questioning: Meaning and making visible Ironside (2003) conducted a qualitative study of nursing faculty and students to find out what teaching (or learning) in a narrative pedagogy classroom was like. Two themes were discovered.
One was thinking as questioning to discover what else there is and what other ways there are to think of the topic versus finding the “best” answer. The other theme related to the capacity for preserving uncertainty and fallibility.
Developing thinking like this in nursing students is beneficial, considering the massive amount of incoming information, diverging views, and chaos that defines clinical practice in the twenty first century. In another qualitative study, Ironside (2006) found that using narrative pedagogy encourages dialogue and interpretation in a community of learning. The focus was on finding meaning to nursing practice and exploring alternate views.
Premise of Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education
Narrative pedagogy is the dialogue and debate among and between teachers, students, and clinicians that questions both what is hidden and what is revealed. We come to know one another through our narratives (Brown, Kirkpatrick, Mangum, & Avery, 2008). The nine themes listed earlier exemplify Concertful practices of schooling, learning, and teaching.
Implications of Narrative Pedagogy In Nursing Education
Faculty construct activities for content and skills acquisition through encouraging meaning making in students relative to stories about experience. This can be done through the narratives of others for example, viewing and discussing a movie, presentation, or a book (McAllister et al., 2009).
Gazarian (2010) describes how students can use digital media to tell their stories. This strategy makes use of the visual and musical aspects of computers. Through listening and responding to stories and personal perceptions, knowledge is developed in context. Sheckel and Irosnide (2006) conducted a phenomenological study on how student thinking is affected by use of narrative pedagogy.
A subtheme of cultivating interpretive thinking emerged, exemplified by students’ discussion of what it meant to be able to make their own clinical assignments. Questions and discussion around stories enact narrative pedagogy as a means for shifting thinking from what is known to what is important and needs to be known.
The Concertful practices offer a climate of productive dialogue among and between clinicians, teachers, and students. Faculty must develop an understanding and skill in using the nine themes of Concertful practices to expose the hidden understandings and provoke new possibilities in nursing education.
Faculty must also understand the nature of the interpretive pedagogies in contrast to and along with conventional pedagogy. Faculty will likely engage in personal and professional introspection because the nine Concertful practices will illuminate both positive and negative attributes.
Students share the responsibility for discourse and deconstruction with clinicians and faculty. Narrative pedagogy fits well with aspects of both constructivism and cognitive learning and may be viewed from a complexity science perspective regarding learning that is interactive, adaptable, creative, builds capability, less predictable and always evolving (Mitchell, Jonas-Simpson, & Cross, 2013 ; Fraser & Greenhalgh, 2001).