Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8551248
CITATIONS
READS
130
1,291
2 AUTHORS:
Dawn Freshwater
Theodore Stickley
University of Leeds
University of Nottingham
SEE PROFILE
SEE PROFILE
Feature
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
NURSE EDUCATION
DISCUSSION
Nurse education, in its rush to embed factors relating to
emotional intelligence such as self-awareness, therapeutic
use of self and critical reflection is guilty of creating mechanistic models, or worse still transplanting models from other
disciplines uncritically. The purpose of providing an education that stimulates an inquiry into the world of the emotions
is to safely bring into current awareness a knowledge of
that which is ordinarily unknown and, at times, unspeakable.
This requires that teachers are in intimate contact with their
own emotions and are able to facilitate learning in the other
from a position of self-knowledge. However, as several
authors have commented, nurse teachers themselves have
low levels of self-awareness and emotional intelligence (Randle
2002; Freshwater 2002). Further, the preferred mode of
teaching is also called into question; the traditional didactic
transference of knowledge is now, more than ever, being
challenged, with the use of art, poetry, dance, drama, music
in the classroom slowly being encouraged in nursing curricula. These expressive modalities can penetrate in an instant
the heart of the learning, more importantly, they help to distinguish the concepts of care and caring from the notion of
treatment and cure.
Frank (1991) differentiates care from treatment. Treatment is a technical routine that could ultimately be performed by a robot. Care is that which is communicated by
the words and actions of an understanding and empathic
95
developing empathy;
a commitment to emotional competency.
Some approaches to experiential learning to be found in an
emotionally intelligent curriculum may include:
forum theatre;
self inquiry;
narrative;
reflective discussion and writing;
art, drama, music, film and poetry;
practising listening skills, both in the classroom and in
practice;
the use of video for observation and feedback;
service user involvement in the planning and delivery of
the course.
Rather than an addendum to the nursing curricula,
emotional intelligence needs to be firmly placed at the core.
For this to be effectively integrated much work needs to be
undertaken to support the highly stressed, often underpaid and
disillusioned teachers who themselves are not only removed
from the caring environment, but also find their own working environment uncaring thus paralleling the processes
that practitioners encounter in their clinical settings. This is
rather like being trapped within a hermeneutic circle and
having no space to reflect on the escape routes. Whilst we
realise that emotional intelligence is not a panacea for all the
ills of nursing and nursing education, we firmly believe that
it is at the heart of learning to care, both for oneself and
others, and as such deserves to be examined in more depth.
Finally, we wish to return to our earlier point that both
the rational and emotional dimensions are essential to
intellectual functioning and indeed to healthcare practices.
Whilst it may appear that we have, in the main, concentrated
our attention on the emotional dimension within the paper,
the very act of putting the paper together is a rational act
driven by emotions such as passion, love and anger. The
focus of the paper has been on the prevailing professional
discourse that tends to devalue emotional intelligence, preferring instead abstract knowledge. We would like to reiterate
here that emotional intelligence and rational intelligence are
interdependent. As such, curriculum designers are tasked
with developing educational strategies that promote stronger
links between the two domains, responding to such questions
as how can educators, practitioners and researchers work within
the current context of underrecruitment and evidence-based
practice to sustain reflective practice and emotional learning.
REFERENCES
Askew S and E Carnell. 1998. Transformatory learning: Individual and global change. London: Cassell.
2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Nursing Inquiry 11(2), 91 98
98