Tell me a story — a conceptual exploration of storytelling in healthcare education

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Summary

The importance of storytelling as the foundation of human experiences cannot be overestimated. The oral traditions focus upon educating and transmitting knowledge and skills and also evolved into one of the earliest methods of communicating scientific discoveries and developments. A wide ranging search of the storytelling, education and health-related literature encompassing the years 1975–2007 was performed. Evidence from disparate elements of education and healthcare were used to inform an exploration of storytelling. This conceptual paper explores the principles of storytelling, evaluates the use of storytelling techniques in education in general, acknowledges the role of storytelling in healthcare delivery, identifies some of the skills learned and benefits derived from storytelling, and speculates upon the use of storytelling strategies in nurse education. Such stories have, until recently been harvested from the experiences of students and of educators, however, there is a growing realization that patients and service users are a rich source of healthcare-related stories that can affect, change and benefit clinical practice. The use of technology such as the Internet discussion boards or digitally-facilitated storytelling has an evolving role in ensuring that patient-generated and experiential stories have a future within nurse education.

Section snippets

Data sources

A wide ranging search of the storytelling, education and health-related literature encompassing the years 1975–2007 was performed using Google Scholar. This approach is particularly useful when undertaking searches which are multi-conceptual or inter-disciplinary as Google Scholar web crawlers have access to the databases of the largest and most well-known scholarly publishers and university presses and is comprehensive rather than disciplinarily exclusive, as in the case in a data bases such

What is storytelling?

Numerous definitions of the concept of storytelling exist. (See for example The National Storytelling Network www.storynet.org or The Centre for Digital Storytelling www.storycenter.org). However all of the different definitions have common elements and thus storytelling can be seen as the effort to communicate events using words (prose or poetry), images, and sounds often including improvisation or embellishment. Although some authors use the word ‘narrative’ as a synonym for ‘story’,

Storytelling in education

Storytelling as a generic educational strategy is reasonably well-established. Abma (2003) refers to the use of stories as teaching tools for ‘organizational learning’, noting that knowledge and appreciation of issues is gained through stories and via an ongoing group dialogue between stories. Abma further notes that stories help to form a sense of group connection and provide a non-judgemental environment for the voluntary sharing of taboo topics. This latter point can also help storytellers

Storytelling in healthcare

Whilst storytelling in the generic or managerial education settings is focussed upon the communication of organizational norms and values, nurse education differs in a desire to access stories that provide insights into healthcare experiences. Thus it is appropriate at this point to consider how storytelling has been used both to engage service users and to transmit health messages.

Storytelling has been used to great effect when sharing health promoting information with different cultural

Storytelling in healthcare education

It is interesting to note that, at a time when healthcare in general is becoming increasingly obsessive about evidence-based practice; the power of storytelling in healthcare education is being explored and promoted. Charon (2006a), writing from a medical perspective, notes that until recently practitioner storytelling was often prefaced with the apology, ‘at the risk of sounding anecdotal’ but goes on to suggest that encouraging healthcare students to explore stories, verbal or written, can

Conclusion

This papers has demonstrated the benefits of storytelling and identified that non-healthcare educational strategies translate well into the healthcare domain. Stories have been used at the healthcare ‘front line’ to promote healthy behaviours and have been used effectively to promote professional identity and group cohesion. Such stories have, until recently been harvested from the experiences of students and of educators, however, there is a growing realization that patients and service users

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