Poetry: An Innovative Teaching Strategy for Exploring Empathy With Beginning Nursing Students

Empathy is a professional value difficult to teach and challenging for beginning nursing students to grasp. This article describes how a poem was integrated in a seminar to engage students in exploring empathy and its relevance to their forming professional identities.

Preseminar, nursing students (N = 8) read a book chapter about thinking empathetically. In seminar, they read an assigned poem and, using guiding questions, discussed it in small and large groups. Postseminar, students wrote self-reflections about their most important learning of the week.

Through in-seminar discussions and postseminar reflections, students crafted new meanings of empathy, contemplated new insights, and integrated them into their imagined professional identities. In written self-reflections, six of eight students indicated the seminar was their most important learning of the week.

Poetry is an engaging platform that makes accessible to beginning students the values of the profession that are difficult to articulate and grasp. [J Nurs Educ. 2018;57(5):315-318.].