Storytelling as cultural assessment

This article describes how story was used to teach cultural assessment to baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in clinicals in long-term care facilities. Class sessions focused on learning to elicit and listen to patients' stories and use story as an assessment tool in clinical practice. With their peers, students learned to listen in a nonjudgmental, contextual way to the values and beliefs of the storyteller. They learned that all people, even those from the dominant mainstream culture, have stories to tell, and that stories build bridges between nurses and clients.