The windmill of learning processes: a learning and teaching tool for student nurses and mentors

This article presents a new approach to student nurses' learning from their interaction with psychiatric patients. Using the approach can enable students and mentors to exploit students' learning opportunities, and help students to get the most out of their clinical placement in a time, where that part of the nursing education has been reduced in some countries as e.g. Denmark. The approach is presented through a model termed the 'Windmill of Learning Processes', which draws on empirical data from a qualitative investigation with an explorative and descriptive design, and on the theoretical concepts of 'disjuncture', and 'everyday life activities'. 'Disjuncture' is defined as a situation in which there is disharmony between a person's experiences and the current situation. In such a situation there is potential for learning. My analysis of the empirical data led to the identification of a new concept, which I have labelled 'collective not-conscious disjuncture'. This is when the student and the mentor are both unaware that the student is operating in a potential learning situation. 'Everyday life activities' are seen as activities that are known to succeed in specific situations, because they have done so in similar situations. I have expanded upon the concept to define another phenomenon, which I have coined 'pseudo-everyday life activities'. These closely resemble everyday life activities, but take place in a psychiatric context.