AESTHETIC KNOWING
How is the nursed supported to live dreams of living and growing in caring?
How could the nurse transcend the moment to create possibilities
within this specific nursing situation?
What metaphors might express the meaning of this nursing situation?
Students studying this nursing situation are challenged to know the person as caring, as living caring uniquely in the moment, as having hopes and dreams for growing in caring, and as being whole or complete in the moment. The student is also challenged to know the nurse as caring person in the moment and to project ways of supporting the nurse as caring person.
Through the study of this situation, students and faculty identify a range of calls for nursing as well as nurturing responses. In this process, there is dialogue focused on knowing the nurse and nursed in the story as caring person. We would contribute the following as our knowing of the nursed as caring person. Through her honest expression of "I'm scared—just look in my eyes," we know her as living hope, honesty, and transcending fear through courage.
Calls for nursing might include a call to be known as caring person and a call to have interconnectedness recognized and affirmed. The nurse's response to these calls is individual and evolves from who one is as person and nurse. Therefore, the range of responses is multiple and varied—each reflecting the nurse's informed living of caring in the moment. Each nurturing response is focused on nurturing the person as he or she lives caring and expresses hopes and dreams for growing in caring.
If the nurse is responding to the call of the person for recognition and affirmation of interconnectedness, perhaps the nurse would express hearing this call by being present with the intention of knowing other as caring person. This may be communicated through active patience—giving the other time and space to be known; through touch which communicates respect and interconnectedness; through the nurse sharing who he or she is as caring person in this relationship—perhaps through tears as the resonance of commonality of this experience is known; through music or poetry if a shared love of these has been discovered.
Through dialogue, students and faculty openly engage in the study of nursing. The dialogue encourages and supports students and faculty to freely express who they are as person and nurse living caring through the re-presented story. It provides an opportunity to affirm values of self and discipline and to study how these values may be lived in practice. It is in this dialogue of nursing that faculty communicate their love for nursing. Time is needed for both faculty and students to reflect on the meaning of being a member of this discipline and more specifically, on the meaning of being a member of a discipline focused on nurturing persons as they live and grow in caring. Dialogue facilitates the integration of this understanding and is a key concept in present and future transformations of nursing education. Common engagement in dialogue as nursing stories are shared and studied is the way of being.
The story lived anew provides students the opportunity to participate in a lived experience of nursing and to create new possibilities. Since nursing can only occur through intentionality and authentic presence with the nursed, students and faculty share how they prepare to enter the world of the nursed, and how they come to understand that world. This process requires that students be encouraged to live fully their personhood. To facilitate such living, faculty support an environment in which students are free to choose and to express self in various ways. For example, perhaps the holistic understanding of a nursing situation would be expressed as aesthetic knowing through dance, poetry, music, painting, or the like. We view this process of education as critical to moral education. When students enter nursing situations to know other as living and growing in caring, they are living out the moral obligation that arises from the commitment to know person as caring. Here, then, is an expression of a dynamic view of morality in which caring is always lived in the moment.
In the study of the situation, Intensive Care, brought to the dialogue are personal experiences of being alone, being afraid, and being with someone and not being heard or seen as caring person. This personal knowing fosters human awareness of our connectedness and interdependence. In this context, the nurse does not study the empirics of cardiac pathology to understand a perceived deficit but rather to become competent in drawing forth the knowledge that is specific to knowing this person as whole in the moment. The nurse comes to know the person as living caring and growing in caring, situated within a particular set of circumstances, some of which the nurse knows explicitly. Each student entering the nursing situation will ask, "How can I nurture this person in living and growing in caring in this situation?" Because each nurse may hear calls for caring in many different ways, nursing responses are many and varied. For nursing faculty, openness to multiple possibilities presents a particular challenge and an opportunity to suspend entrenched patterns of teaching nursing.
Faculty and students study nursing together. Faculty join students in a constant search to discover the content and meaning of the discipline. Undoubtedly, this understanding of extant possibilities presents a different view of the role of teacher. Yet, it is a view that engenders the sort of humility essential to nursing for there is always more to know. Although past methods of teaching of nursing may have been comfortably structured through textbooks organized around medical science, faculty are now empowered to question what should be the focus of study in the discipline of nursing. Faculty are encouraged to take risks and let go of the familiar. The perspective that Nursing as Caring conveys—the fullness and richness of nursing—will allow faculty to willingly assume the risks inherent in a new way of guiding the study of nursing.