Storytelling as Pedagogy: Perceptions of Nurse Educators

This research study examines how nursing educators integrate storytelling as pedagogy into teaching nursing students in both the classroom and clinical areas. At present, there are limited research studies about the effectiveness of storytelling pedagogy. This research will begin to fill the evidence gap for nurse educators as they prepare to meet the challenges of preparing contemporary nursing students for professional practice in the midst of the transformation in healthcare today. The main objectives of this study are to explore the use of storytelling in nursing education by considering how and when stories are used, the inter-relationship of course content with storytelling as a primary teaching strategy, how storytelling influences nursing professional practice, and whether storytelling can lead to improved learning outcomes for nursing students. A phenomenological design was selected to explore storytelling pedagogy because of its potential to use scholarly inquiry to obtain in-depth responses from participants that reflect their beliefs and personal experiences. Data collection consisted of in-depth telephone interviews with responses from 21 nurse educators who have direct experience teaching using storytelling pedagogy in their own courses from both private and public learning institutions. Interview data was analyzed with a qualitative approach to identify themes reflected from all collected data.