Creating Meaningful Learning for Children's Nursing Students: Can Museum Field Trips Offer Added Value?

Children's nurses require a wide range of skills and knowledge to enable them to provide the best care for children and families, thus nurse educators must continually strive to ensure they create appropriate and meaningful learning for students in their journey to become children's nurses. Museum visits have been utilized previously within nurse education, but no evidence as to any added value of such visits on the learning of children's nursing students has been reported. This article highlights an innovative teaching strategy that was introduced to a group of year 1 children's nursing students-a field visit to the Museum of Childhood in London-and demonstrates the potential value to their learning. Students worked together in small groups within the museum exploring topics relevant to children's nursing. They had an opportunity to reflect and research further and then worked together to present their learning to their peers. Subsequent evaluation of both the visit and the presentation helped unravel the extent of student learning and highlighted that a range of different learning had taken place. Not without its challenges, the museum visit seemed to provide a meaningful learning experience for students, and suggestions for improving the learning for future similar groups have been explored.