Narrative Pedagogy in Nursing



Narrative Pedagogy in Nursing

Introduction

Narrative pedagogy has been developed over the last decade in nursing as a means of complementing a conventional content and competency driven pedagogy (Benner, 1994). It focuses attention on the human experience of health care by deriving shared meanings from interpretation of stories. This allows students to explore the different perspectives of those involved (Shafer & Fish, 1994). The emotional experiences of participants can be understood, conventional wisdom challenged and new knowledge emerge as students work together to construct their learning (Frank, 2003). Individual stories are embedded within the narrative and teachers have successfully used literature and film as narratives to help them explore the meaning of health care with students. Modern technology has opened up a new range of electronic narratives such as virtual simulation (Shafer & Fish, 1994).

The conventional approach to nursing education has been dominant in the teaching and learning environment in Japan. Some teachers are now seeking alternative approaches that can offer new ways of practice for reforming nursing education. Narrative Pedagogy can be used to guide the reconstruction of nursing education in Japan (Benner, 1994). The author reviews contemporary approaches to nursing education in Japan and discusses the strategies for implementing Narrative Pedagogy into the nursing education environment (Frank, 2003). The paper offer a model for teaching graduate nursing students about health policy using service learning and an operating framework that will enhance their political development. Significant factors include site selection, using a group practicum, and assessing the return on investment for students and faculty.

Discussion

The experience of illness -- of the body's impairment, deterioration or recovery, and, ultimately, its mortality -- concerns a broad set of persons: ill persons themselves, their families and caregivers, their healers (be they physicians, nurses, and therapists of all sorts), and a host of publics who administer, finance, counsel, profit from, or otherwise serve as partners in health care systems regionally, nationally, and internationally (Shafer & Fish, 1994). All of these parties have some need to make sense of what is happening to those persons experiencing illness and how they are being treated (Benner, 1994). For patients, there is often a profound need to understand how illness has changed their worlds as well as themselves, whether in threatening eventual death or in altering the possibilities of life on a daily basis (Shafer & Fish, 1994). For health providers--physicians and their allies in health care--they need to understand the integrity of a patient's life course may be central to understanding or diagnosing the illness itself or in seeking amelioration by treatment plans of ambitious or conservative design (Ayres, 2000). Equally, as health providers encounter pain, disfigurement, death, and fragmentation across the individual lives of their patients, their own realities as compassionate and competent human beings on course toward a common mortality come into question (Frank, 2003). Further, problems of ethical as well as psychological challenge necessarily accompany the practice of healing arts (Shafer & Fish, 1994).

All of these issues find expression or response in ...