The Dancing Nurses and the Language of the Body

Abstract

At first glance, dance and movement may appear foreign to the idea of nurse education. On closer inspection, it could be high time. The flow of words may stop, but the body is always in movement--always communicating. Still, the language of the body, and certainly movement, is an often overlooked potential in education. This is also true for nurse education: in spite of the often bodily close meetings with vulnerable and crisis-stricken patients. These meetings make great demands on the nurse to both contain own feelings and be able to "read" and understand patients' often only sense-based communication. This dimension of the nursing profession can be overwhelming, touching, and shocking for young nursing students. This research project examines, whether a course composed of theory, dance and movement lessons, and increased focus on the bodily communication between students and patients may be developmental for the nursing students' beginning embodied professionality. Results from the project have innovative educational potentials. They also give concrete indications of how nursing educations can develop new holistic anchored embodied training in a very accessible, as well as essential, ancient, and unavoidably present part of the nursing profession.

Effects of Arts-Based Pedagogy on Competence Development in Nursing: A Critical Systematic Review

“…Arts-based learning offers interesting opportunities, such as exploring underrepresented art forms like comics, and developing interdisciplinary competencies such as intercultural skills [ 114 ]. Dance may enhance communication and collaboration skills [ 134 ] and other competencies relevant to clinical leadership [ 135 ], but it lacks solid quantitative research representation.…”

Performing arts as a tool for university education during a pandemic: Moving from an in vivo to an in vitro modality

“…Some notable examples include using drama to teach history (Taylor, 2008), archeology (Trimmis & Kalogirou, 2018), psychology (Kloetzer et al, 2020) or social science theory (Gravey et al, 2017); poetry to teach social workers (Parker, 2020); dance to teach engineers (Baudin, 2016) and nurses (Winther, 2015); performing arts in medicine education (Hooker & Dalton, 2019) or language teaching (Mentz & Fleiner, 2019). This article examines a university course on improvisation and collective creation, addressed to master's students of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland (Feraud et al, 2020;Kloetzer et al, 2020).…”

Movement as a critical concept in model generation to attain wholeness

“…Movement is vital in the caring and healing actions in nursing and is important in rendering quality care. Movement occurs between both the nurse and the patient (Winther, Grontved, Graveson, & Ilkjaer, 2014). Individuals with mental health issues experience a wide range of obstacles in taking care of themselves and being part of a community as well as being a patient in a healthcare system.…”