Elsevier

Nursing Outlook

Volume 54, Issue 3, May–June 2006, Pages 159-165
Nursing Outlook

Article
Cultivating interpretive thinking through enacting narrative pedagogy

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Teachers and educational researchers in nursing have persisted in their attempts to teach students critical thinking and to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts. Yet, despite the plethora of studies investigating critical thinking, there is a paucity of research providing evidence that teachers’ efforts improve students’ thinking. The purpose of this interpretive phenomenological study is to explicate how students’ thinking can be extended when teachers use Narrative Pedagogy. Specifically, the theme Cultivating Interpretive Thinking refers to how teachers’ use of Narrative Pedagogy moves beyond the critical thinking movement’s emphasis on analytical thinking (ie, problem solving). Cultivating Interpretive Thinking offers an innovative approach for teaching and learning thinking that attends to students’ embodied, reflective, and pluralistic thinking experiences. Teachers who cultivate interpretive thinking add complexity to students’ thinking to better prepare them for challenging, complex, and unpredictable clinical environments.

Section snippets

Literature review

For the past several decades, the nursing education literature has reflected both anecdotal and data-based reports addressing how teachers are developing students’ critical thinking abilities.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 However, nursing teachers and researchers are increasingly acknowledging that this body of literature provides insufficient, ambiguous, and conflicting evidence of just how teachers can best promote and evaluate students’ critical thinking.14, 15 Furthermore, because most

Design

Forty-eight teachers and 11 students participated in the distance desktop faculty development study, which was conducted to improve the learning climates for students in schools of nursing through increasing teachers’ pedagogical literacy and skill in enacting Narrative Pedagogy. The Institutional Review Board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison approved the study. Investigators collected data via non-structured, audiotaped interviews in person or by telephone. Each interview began when the

Theme: Cultivating Interpretive Thinking

When asked to relate their experiences in courses in which teachers tried something new, many of the student participants in this study described teachers’ use of familiar teaching strategies such as, in this paradigm case, inviting students to make their own clinical assignments. In other words, many of the teaching strategies described by student participants were not in and of themselves particularly novel or unique. When using these strategies with Narrative Pedagogy, however, teachers

Conclusions

This study documents how teachers can use Narrative Pedagogy to make small and nuanced changes in familiar strategies to cultivate students’ interpretive thinking. Interpretive thinking includes analytic thinking, predominant in the critical thinking movement, as well as thinking that is reflective, embodied, and pluralistic. In this study, when Mae’s teacher asked students to reflect on, share and collectively consider the meaning of selecting their own patient assignment, she created a place

Implications for future research

This study underscores the potential that enacting Narrative Pedagogy has for teachers and researchers to extend the critical thinking movement in nursing education. Since this is one of only a few studies that explicate the newly identified interpretive thinking,4, 48 further research is needed to explicate diverse ways teachers’ can use Narrative Pedagogy to cultivate interpretive thinking in both classroom and clinical situations. As well, studies are needed that collect data from dyads of

Martha M. Scheckel is an Assistant Professor at Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Martha M. Scheckel is an Assistant Professor at Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI.

    Pamela M. Ironside is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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