Gail M. Lindsay

Opening the black-box of person-centred care: An arts-informed narrative inquiry into mental health education and practice

BACKGROUND Nursing education has a history of encouraging students to know their patients and to negotiate the in-between of art/science, person/profession, and intuition/evidence. Nurse-teachers know that students may abandon some values and practices when they encounter practice environments that are complex and have competing agendas. We are concerned that nursing knowledge is black-boxed, invisible and taken-for-granted, in healthcare settings. OBJECTIVES Our research explores how nursing students and nurses are constructing and enacting person-centred care in mental health education and practice. We want to understand the nursing standpoint on this significant ontological issue and to make nursing knowledge construction and utilization visible; illuminating how person-centred theory emerges from practice. DESIGN The process involved four 3-hour group meetings and an individual follow-up telephone conversation. SETTINGS Students and nurses met at a tertiary-care mental health organization. PARTICIPANTS Fourteen nurses (Registered Nurses and Registered Practical Nurses) and nursing students (Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Practical Nursing) participated in our inquiry. METHODS We used arts-informed narrative inquiry to explore experience through the arts such as metaphor, collage, poems, letters, and group conversations. RESULTS The black-box is opened as the inquiry reveals how nursing knowledge is constructed, assumptions are challenged and new practices emerge. CONCLUSIONS Our research is significant for education and for practice and is transferable to other populations and settings. Nurses are affirmed in person-centred values and practices that include partnership with those in their care, role modeling for colleagues and mentoring students and new nurses. Students participate in transferring their learning from school to practice, in the company of experienced colleagues; together they open the black-box to show how nurses conceptualize and enact person-centred care.

Using ‘I’ in scholarly writing: how does reflecting on experience matter?

How do students engage in reflective practice in teaching‐learning situations when they have been told that first person writing is not scholarly and that expressions of their thinking are merely opinions? Thinking narratively, three students and a nurse‐teacher critically reflect on identity and knowledge construction emergent through the pattern of knowing that is personal. Exemplars from a Knowledge & Inquiry course show that learning and transformation are, at least in part, internal processes that require activities to foster self‐awareness for working within relationships. Teachers in diverse disciplines are invited to consider how it matters socially that professional education embraces personal transformation through reflecting on and reconstructing experience.

Narrative Inquiry: Experience matters

Narrative Inquiry is a research methodology that we adapted over the past two decades from Canadian higher education and curriculum studies to nursing research, education, and health-care practice. The Narrative Inquiry we use originated from Connelly and Clandinin in the 1990s, and rests on John Dewey’s philosophy that experience is relational, temporal, and situational, and as such, if intentionally explored, has the potential to be educational. More specifically, it is only when experience is reflected upon and reconstructed that it has the potential to reveal the construction of identity, knowledge, and the humanness of care. Congruent with the expectation that nurses are reflective practitioners and knowledge-makers, Narrative Inquiry provides a means to enhance, not only quality of care, but quality of experience of those in our care: in education, our students, and in practice, our patients. In this article, we explicate how Narrative Inquiry may be lived in health-care education and practice, with a primary focus on nursing. We illuminate how we support our graduate students, the next generation of narrative inquirers, through a Narrative Inquiry Works-in-Progress group.

Arts-Informed Narrative Inquiry into nurse-teachers’ legacy for the next generation

Fewer teachers are available globally for nursing education positions, a fact exacerbated by retirement of ageing colleagues. As two late career nurse-teachers, we use Arts-Informed Narrative Inquiry to explore experiences of Canadian contemporaries to discern the legacy we have to share with nurse-teachers who come after us. Narrative Inquiry is a research process that reconstructs personal and professional experience to reveal learning and knowledge construction in researchers and teachers. It involves lifelines, stories, metaphors, collage-making and reflective dialogue to reveal what experienced nurse-teachers have learned about teaching-learning over their professional trajectories. As an outcome of this study, we offer a letter to new teachers as a legacy arising from conceptualizing teaching-learning practice as humanness of care; the creative processes for self-directed, site-specific faculty development are transferable to any professional and geographical contexts. The paper illuminates how research, education and practice are mutually informing and how emergent inquiry approaches are significant for faculty and curriculum development, as well as transformation of practices.

Graduates’ Experiences of Transition and Transformation Following Completion of a Nursing Bridging Education Program

Background: Nursing bridging education (NBE) refers to educational programs that support learners to move from one level of educational preparation or practice to another.

Autobiographical reflections on what it means to experience disruption

Abstract Accepting disruption as an inevitable occurrence in life, five nurse-teacher-researchers explore their experience with being disruptive/being disrupted. Reflection on the all-encompassing embodied experience of disruption takes us through a process of exploration and meaning-making. We pause to show what it is like to be in-between the known and unknown in creating a life in academia through stories. Plotlines such as being in-between family and work; transplanted outsider seeking a sense of belonging; going into the chaos while feeling invisible; and self-induced disruption in response to loss illuminate our reflection. The metaphor of the breathturn allows us to reconstruct our experience and to discern possibilities beyond the usual negative connotations.