Lessons from literature: caring, interpretation, and dialogue

There can be little doubt that nursing, like other arts and sciences, is experiencing an "interpretive turn" (Hiley, Bohman, & Shusterman, 1991). As part of this more global "turn," the curriculum revolution has spurred nurse educators to critically examine their schools, curricula, and everyday practices as teachers and propose alternative pedagogies where appropriate. I argue that what is now being developed as nursing humanities is a valuable approach to interpretive pedagogy which challenges, stimulates, integrates, and develops students' thinking and understanding of the lived experience of patients/clients in ways that more traditional scientific and behaviorist approaches to nursing education are unable to do. In creating courses or learning experiences using nursing humanities, it is essential to attend to both content and pedagogical approach as being inseparable. Ignoring the former will produce no more than a pleasant chat, while ignoring the latter will result in mere "metaphor counting" or rote learning of "what the book, story, or poem means." Nurse educators have used literature to help illuminate health and illness issues in the past, but unfortunately, this has been viewed as an essentially marginal approach. While novels, stories, poems, and other literature can certainly be used in almost any nursing class, I believe that nursing humanities is such a rich seam of pedagogical and critical possibility that it merits development of specific courses and options within all of our nursing courses and programs.