Nursing education is driven by emerging challenges of scientific, technological, and professional advances that require the use of strategies that promote students' development of critical thinking for decision making in different contexts. It also requires that teachers constantly reflect on their pedagogical practices and (re)think them using strategies that allow their enhancement. The use of multimodal narratives (MNs) can be an important tool for teachers' professional development, namely to improve their classroom practices. Given the novelty of the use of MNs in nursing education, this chapter presents an analysis concerning the experience of making a MN and how it has been reflected in the authors' pedagogical practices. With this experience, potentialities of continuing to use MNs in nurse education are explored.
TopBackground
Nursing education integrated into higher education (HE), as it is in Portugal, has undergone deep changes, not only to follow the scientific−technological evolution of the area, but also the paradigm’s changes in nursing care and the pedagogical-didactics approaches recommended for HE. Today it is expected that a nurse, in the context of clinical practice, is a professional who supports his/her practices with scientific evidence for a contextualized decision-making in order to care for the person, family, groups and community throughout the life cycle, and to follow them up in their transitions and in the management of their health projects (Costa, 2011; International Family Nursing Association/IFNA, 2017; Rua, 2011).
Regarding the health-care contexts, where nursing practices most often occur, and where decision-making based on a set of specific competencies can be observed, these are highly demanding and unpredictable, not only from the point of view of the health/ illness conditions of the users, but also from their involvement in their health projects. This requires nurses’ competencies in different dimensions, which are developed from initial education, but which must be extended throughout life, particularly when leading to a specialist level in a specific nursing area (IFNA, 2015; Popil, 2011). Given these assumptions, the training of these professionals, at the specialization level (always in the context of HE), requires a constant movement to improve the pedagogical practices of their teachers based on strategies that promote the development of new and deeper competences, such as critical thinking, considering that they are postgraduate students and, most of them, have been working for some years.
Taking on board the literature about teaching practices in the context of nursing education at the second cycle (postgraduation), where this study took place, it is evident that there is a constant need to improve them through more active strategies and critical-thinking activities, among other competencies.