Schooling Learning Teaching

These are times of relentless change in higher education. Calls for reform across the political, social, and theological spectrum have become commonplace. The research literature of education, as well as nursing education literature, abounds with a cacophony of voices centered on educational reform through concretizing, standardizing, critiquing, or deconstructing extant pedagogies. Outside educational circles, calls for change also emerge, with the state of education frequently conceptualized as a crisis brought about by the lack of accountability of faculty or lack of motivation of students. In other words, the problems necessitating reform are problems with faculty, with students, or with both rather than with the underlying pedagogy being used. In health professions in general, and nursing education specifically, these calls for reform are intensified by the persistent need to prepare more practitioners in a shorter time and to prepare them to deliver healthcare that is safer and of higher quality than that currently experienced by many recipients of health services. Shortages of faculty, particularly those prepared for teaching, further exacerbate concerns. What has become clear is that neither simply doing more of the same (more content, more skills, more experiences) nor pressuring faculty and students to do more will address these concerns in a substantive way. Indeed, if these challenges were amenable to “more,” they would not persist as problems to be addressed! Rather, new approaches are sorely needed—approaches that rethink the nature of schooling learning teaching amid the complexities and demands of both educational and clinical environments. This book describes such an approach. Narrative Pedagogy emerges from listening to the shared stories of students, teachers, and clinicians. Narrative Pedagogy enacts hermeneutic phenomenology as it gathers students, teachers, and clinicians in communally interpreting the narrative tellings of their experiences in nursing education and participation in nursing practice. As such, Narrative Pedagogy is a recovery of the often overlooked understanding of schooling learning teaching as a phenomenon from the simplistic reduction of schooling to a production of competency outcomes, of learning to the achievement of a set of pre-specified competencies, and of teaching to a particular set of strategies. Drawing on over 20 years of scholarship, the authors have listened to, interpreted, and learned from these narrative tellings. As a nursing scholar, Nancy Diekelmann conducted a series of hermeneutic phenomenological studies in nursing education and identified the Concernful Practices of Schooling Learning Teaching. The Concernful Practices describe the shared experiences of teachers, students, and clinicians as they gather for learning and provide a new language to articulate what matters in their experiences. During the course of her research it became apparent that as teachers, students, and clinicians at pilot schools attended to the Concernful Practices in their pedagogical encounters, Narrative Pedagogy as a phenomenon became sighted (showed itself). Since that time, schools of nursing and midwifery around the globe have worked in concert to enact Narrative Pedagogy in order to transform their schools through attending to how Concernful Practices show up. Publicly sharing and interpreting stories of their experiences, as well as thinking together about both how these experiences are understood and what possibilities can show up through thinking from a different place, have enabled a richer way of letting the phenomena of sighting and listening disclose and beckon themselves. The narrative excerpts threaded through this book reflect the wisdom of years of listening to and interpreting stories of these experiences juxtaposed to and enriched by hermeneutic phenomenological thinking. The conversations provided in this book are fictive—each a compilation of many experiences shared by participants over the course of this research and placed into conversation illuminating richer ways of thinking and comportment and concomitant possibilities for reform. These converging conversations reflect shared concerns and insights of both authors and participants and deepen the collective disciplinary understanding of the possibilities emerging from enacting Narrative Pedagogy. The converging conversations provide the reader with a glimpse of the phenomenon of schooling teaching learning as it shows up in nursing education, although the insights proffered resonate far beyond the health professions and human sciences disciplines.