Trying something new: reform as embracing the possible, the familiar, and the at-hand

Trying something new in the reform of teaching through the use of a new nursing pedagogy, Narrative Pedagogy, is illuminated. Pedagogies are specific approaches to teaching and learning. Narrative Pedagogy is a site-specific approach to teaching and learning that evolves out of present resources and creates new possibilities. Exemplar student, teacher, and nurse preceptor narratives about their experiences of trying something new in precepting junior-level students in the acute care clinical setting were analyzed hermeneutically as an interpretive phenomenological study. Although Narrative Pedagogy is site specific, the processes of using this pedagogy for reform are generalizable.