Nursing students’ international placement experience: an arts-informed Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Research shows that high cultural competence is most often acquired through both the theoretical education and the practical experiences within the international contexts. The purpose of this project evaluation was to learn from four undergraduate nursing students, who spent three-months in a Brazilian community, how they experienced their international placement. Students' emotive responses to their international placement were elicited using the creative Narrative Reflective Process, which is informed by the Narrative Inquiry qualitative framework. This process included stories, memory box, metaphor and drawing, and creative writing. The generated creative data were reflected upon by the participants and key narrative threads teased out. The overarching findings speak to the transcultural exchange that took place: students went to teach the local population of Brazil about the social determinants of health from the Canadian perspective, while in turn learning life lessons from their hosts that enriched their personal and professional ways of being.

The bodily practice of acquiring skillfulness

“…Ghyle from the Institute of Reflective Practice has launched a program for reflection as a strategy both for doing research and for educational practice. Current examples that address the reflective practitioner are presented by, for example, Schwind, Zanchetta, Aksenchuk, & Gorospe (2013) and Farrell (2013). However, the text that has been most influential in the field of reflective practice is still Schön's classic work from 1983.…”

vChanging Student Nurses Values, Attitudes, and Behaviours: A Meta Ethnography of Enrichment Activities

“…The restructuring of the participants' values and beliefs through premise reflection was evident in the articles where internalisation had occurred, statements relate to the opening of hearts and minds, becoming self-aware, seeing the learning, and the bridging of theory to practice [11,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Therefore one can elucidate both cognitive and affective domain development occurred.…”

“…The activity is based around a new cultural encounter: The activities that created the most significant modification in affective domain development, resulting in the internalisation of learning, and are considered by Epstein to be permanent, were those that introduced the nursing students to a new patient, personal, or professional culture via an international placement or an inter-professional training programme [32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Nursing students recognised that the cultural experience not only had changed how they practised as a nurse, but how they identified themselves as nurses.…”

“…Affective domain development at the internalisation stage occurred when students were totally immersed in the activity [11,[32][33][34]36,37] or the activity was repeated frequently over 6 weeks [38]. Benefits of the length of the programme on the professional identity of student's demonstrated self-reflection had occurred and that new values and attitudes had developed as a consequence [35].…”

“…In order to ensure that the new values and attitudes did not return to previously held assumptions at the compliance and identification stage, activities need to be repeated frequently [22,36,44,37]. New habits need repetition if they are to be conditioned into the student's way of being [59].…”