The craft of teaching qualitative research: linking methodology to practice

Qualitative inquiry provides a means of apprehending the personal and contextual experiences of health and health care as well as the complex social, cultural and political issues that influence services and professional practice. Despite its usefulness in informing clinical practice, it is undervalued and under-utilised in contemporary nursing research. A number of organisational, ideological and educational reasons exist for this situation. This paper addresses educational issues, specifically teaching practice. We discuss craft knowledge, an important but often obscured practice, and its use in qualitative research education, drawing on the findings of a project that investigated a group of nursing academics' experiences and perceptions about teaching qualitative research. We argue that craft knowledge offers teachers a means to inspire and engage clinician students to learn not only the content and research skills required to do good qualitative research but to learn more about the standpoint and sensibilities of being qualitative researchers. In this way craft knowledge does two things. First it helps to move beyond the content versus process polemic that often dominates educational debate. Second, by enhancing the quality of educational experience, it potentially helps clinicians to value qualitative inquiry and thus defend and use it to inform clinical practice.