Contributions and Limits of a Clinical Approach to Work in the Development of Nursing Students’ Professional Identity

Empirical Studies
By Béatrice Brignon, Jean Ravestein
English

This article focuses on nursing students’ health issues when learning their trade. These issues are considered from their ability to endorse the responsibility of their acts to their assumption of performance of their practices in light of their professional identity. The aim was to study the contribution of the nursing students’ activity analysis to the development of their professional identity throughout this reflective activity. The cross confrontation plan, in which video was used for observations, has enabled to show the evolution of the conflict of ideas between meaning and efficiency by the variation of people involved, first of all the researcher, then another student and at last professional participants. Four voluntary students in their third year class, who most likely have developed more professional norms than the first year class students, have analyzed, as a pair of peers, a comparable care they made during a surgery work experience to some patients who were voluntary too. Willing to understand the global care, the students have chosen to be filmed while interacting with the patients. They wanted to go beyond the technical act. Therefore the indirect historical method of the clinical approach of activity has induced the development of the student’s reflection both on their way nursing and on their way of being regarding the profession they are learning. The dialogic observatory generated both by the four nursing students discussing their care and by four expert trainers analyzing these reflections, has highlighted how the discursive activity between students has contributed to transform their care and their professional identity all together. Moreover, as a pair, the trainers have debated about the nursing activities and the professional identity. They have discussed capitalizing students’ agreements for further use in teaching and questioned their own practices. Their exchanges, built upon watching significant video extracts of students’ confrontations, led them to a better understanding of how the students may go beyond the set tasks, not only by making theirs the professional rules, but also by creating their own professional rules. The nursing students have thus become resources for the learning organization. The proposed analysis model can therefore be useful to nursing trainers as well as tutors.

Keywords

  • clinical approach of activity
  • occupational health
  • professional development
  • professional identity
  • dialogical activity
  • nursing education
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