(Re)constructing the experiential continuum: a focused ethnography of the professional socialisation of Chilean nursing students
Creators: name: Faúndez Aedo, Matías
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2023
Subjects: Professional socialisation
Nursing education
Ethnography
Critical Realism
learning theory
Philosophy of experience

description: BACKGROUND: Professional socialisation in nursing (PSN) encapsulates a complex and multifactorial process whereby students become professionals (Scanlon, 2011; Zarshenas et al., 2014). Although it has been a widely discussed phenomenon from a historical and multidisciplinary point of view, several aspects still remain enigmatic, particularly the mechanisms involved in how students learn to be the professionals they become through professional education. One of the reasons for this, I argue, is that PSN, being a learning process by nature, has not been explicitly addressed from a learning theory perspective in the body of literature, thus not thoroughly theorised as an experiential, situated and transformative phenomenon (Illeris, 2007; Jarvis, 2012b). I, therefore, conducted a focused ethnography on nursing students’ professional socialisation aimed at illuminating how they develop situated and transformative experiences of learning as they become professional nurses through professional education. Importantly, this study was locally contextualised in Chile, where studies addressing nursing education through the lenses of PSN theory are scarce. DESIGN: Using a critical realist lens, I employed a focused ethnographic methodology guided analytically by Grounded Theory principles (Knoblauch, 2005; Bryant, 2017; Danermark, Ekström and Karlsson, 2019). I started with two months of participant observation with fourth-year nursing students (of a five-years programme) from September to October 2019 in a nursing school from a public university in Chile. I followed seven students in their last year of studies using audio diaries from March 2020 to March 2021, collecting 46 individual entries. I culminated in a stage of interviews (n=12 final-year students) to deepen and refine the analysis. The material was transcribed and managed with NVivo. FINDINGS: The findings and discussion illuminate the ways in which students construct and reconstruct their personal experiences as they learn the professional role, which is encapsulated in the core process (Re)constructing their experiential continuum. This process is comprised by the two main categories Making sense of their experiential journey and Developing a dynamic trajectory of learning. The first category condenses key mechanisms whereby the students assign meaning to their experiences of socialisation, while the second one describes the ways students interact with these experiences via retrospection and prospection, thereby connecting the biographical past with the anticipated future and giving rise to new experiences in the present. These categories offer a comprehensive analytical framework to understand how learning in PSN involves the person as a whole and may take place dynamically in time as personal experiences are constantly constructed and reconstructed. Furthermore, this study helps characterise PSN as a situated and transformative phenomenon by explaining the ways the students navigate agentially the structural context of their experiences at university and how they may be affected by these experiences at the level of the Self and identity. Overall, the findings of the study resonate with the Deweyan apology for the organic connection between experience and education (Dewey, 1938), thus with the need for a sound and integrative philosophy of experience in the understanding of human learning and socialisation. This research suggests a new typology of learning that encompasses and interconnects both the experiential past and the future in a meaningful way. Lastly, I see that the retrieval of PSN as a learning phenomenon may catalyse a beneficial paradigmatic shift in nursing education by helping examine the pedagogic practices through the experiential, situated and transformative aspects of students’ process of becoming professionals.