From Sully to Nightingale: Critical Thinking Through Esthetic Learning

Nursing faculty continually seek new teaching strategies to promote prelicensure nursing students' critical thinking. Students construct new knowledge through experience. Esthetic learning methodologies involve gaining knowledge and insight through emotive, firsthand experiences. The esthetic experience of watching a movie, coupled with reflective journaling, has been used with health care students to promote learning. However, little is documented in the literature on its use with nursing students or its influence on the formulation of critical thinking skills.

This descriptive qualitative study explored the impact of watching the movie, Sully, followed by structured reflective journaling on critical thinking of prelicensure nursing students.

Themes were identified which demonstrated students' insights into the components of critical thinking and expert thinking.

Esthetic learning is a promising teaching approach that addresses multiple ways of knowing, thereby enhancing students' learning about critical thinking in a prelicensure education program. [.