Teaching ethics: telling stories

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Bioethics
• Feminist Theory

Background:

• Traditional ethics education in nursing often focuses on justice-based principles.
• A feminist care perspective offers a complementary approach, emphasizing context and relationality.
• Moral literacy requires a comprehensive understanding of diverse ethical frameworks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To advocate for the integration of feminist care ethics alongside justice-based ethics in nursing education.
• To enhance moral literacy and critical consciousness among nursing students.
• To explore the contextual and relational aspects of ethical decision-making in nursing.

Main Methods:

• The study proposes a pedagogical approach combining traditional ethical analysis with feminist narrative methods.
• Encouraging students to share their experiences to understand ethical dilemmas.
• Analyzing ethical decision-making through the lens of roles, motives, and contextual influences.

Main Results:

• Exposure to both justice-based and feminist care perspectives equips students with richer ethical analysis tools.
• Feminist approaches validate "women's ways of knowing" and encourage critical self-reflection on context.
• This integrated approach fosters deeper understanding of ethical complexities in nursing.

Conclusions:

• Moral literacy in nursing is best developed through a dual approach: justice-based ethics and feminist care ethics.
• Nurses benefit from tools to analyze dilemmas within their specific contexts.
• Fostering critical consciousness requires validating diverse perspectives and questioning preconceived notions in moral reasoning.