Advancing affective attributes and empowering undergraduate students--lessons learned from the Bali bombing

Caring as an integral component in the nursing curriculum is enjoying a resurgence in the literature of late. The argument is that nursing education has tended to overemphasise the cognitive domain and under emphasise the affective. An alternative is to use the combined effect of cognition, imagination, intuition and emotion. This is supported by the theory of transformational learning, whereby students clarify their personal and professional purpose in life and are empowered to become informed, self-efficacious practitioners and autonomous thinkers as they negotiate personal values and meaning. In order to integrate these important theoretical concepts into everyday practice, educators need practical examples and case studies that show how caring is taught. This paper continues the conversation on narrative and transformational learning pedagogies and illustrates how affective attributes are developed through a single lecture. The aim of the lecture was to sensitise students to the human impact of terrorism and violence and the effects on both health care workers and the survivors of trauma. The rationale was that by allowing students to critically reflect on their own core knowledge and skills, they could question prior perceptions of their role, resulting in a revised or new perspective of those experiences and strengthen their belief in their abilities to cope in crisis situations. This transformative approach involved the delivery of knowledge and theory underpinning disaster response, personal narratives about a critical learning event that embodied clinically relevant lessons, activities that promoted critical self-reflection to strengthen students' beliefs in their own ability to cope by converting core knowledge into action and, finally student evaluation of the lesson (see Table 1).