Nurstory: Stories of Nursing Practice for Social Justice
By Raeann LeBlanc
Editor’s Note: For the past ten years, StoryCenter has enjoyed a key partner in the Nurstory initiative. This program brings nurses and nursing students together to share stories about their work, and to reflect on how caring for others impacts them. Raeann LeBlanc is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an Advanced Practice Nurse and Certified Palliative Care and Hospice Nurse, specializing in the care of persons with chronic conditions and serious illness. She has both participated in and co-facilitated Nurstory workshops. In this piece, she shares her views on the power of story in nursing practice.
The first Nurstory workshop I attended at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was in the spring of 2015. It was part of a larger symposium exploring social justice and nursing at the University, where our stories were shared. The storytelling process is not one that I had explored with this group of colleagues, and we moved through our stories together—first by sharing them out loud, giving them voice, and then by creating and crafting the digital stories. Our stories centered on the broad theme of social justice, and yet, they were very personal, real, clear, and relatable. These were smaller acts of justice, given voice by a group of nurses.
The story I chose to tell was about an experience I’d had a few weeks earlier in my clinical practice, where the rush of the practice, the medicalization, excessive task orientation, and the clinical environment itself seemed to sharply contrast with the care necessary at the end of life. The practices of nursing, in addition to the high level of skill and knowledge—presence, kindness, attention, attribution of dignity, and connection to what matters among people in a single interaction—were emphasized in the story. The digital storytelling process slowed this experience, and offered a form of perspective on taking the environment and professional realm of a nurse as a social and just act. Light was used in the images to emphasize the shifts of tone, and this was reinforced in the musical choice, in sharing this experience as a story, and in the shifting affective responses of my various personal and professional perspectives in a single interaction. Looking Inside emphasizes the power of reflection necessary for social justice to manifest in small acts of kindness.
Don Berwick with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement states that, “...professional silence in the face of social injustice is wrong.” In retrospect, I think about how the digital storytelling process in that workshop, and the Nurstory project, itself, offers nurses the opportunity to access our own professional voice as a medium for social justice work across many different themes. Digital storytelling can be engaged with on many levels, and because the medium can be shared digitally, it can be accessed easily for the nursing classroom, as well as in practice settings.
Creating a digital story in a Nurstory workshop offered me the opportunity to become a facilitator in teaching other students—first, integrating the viewing and listening of digital stories into courses, and having the class share reflections on these stories, and later, in students producing their own digital stories. As I have brought digital stories into the classroom, the response from students has been very positive and has added to creating a community.
An especially powerful student response to digital storytelling has been to articulate what it has meant for them to act as authors and agents of their own stories. One student stated:
“I thought the digital story project was one of the most fitting and effective projects that I have done … I think these perspectives and stories are eye opening and help my own learning, because they allow us to tell a story how we want to tell it, which is incredibly important if we are ever trying to support those who are going through a difficult time. We have to let people tell their story. On top of that, these stories require us to be a little vulnerable, which rarely happens in a classroom… but I think that we learn the most about ourselves and others when we embrace vulnerability. So I think that these stories are a really original class project that will result in better learning for me, because watching them allows me to come to my own conclusions and learn from what others have said or experienced."
Bringing digital storytelling and the Nurstory project into the nursing curriculum and classroom is central to the philosophy that Paula Kagan, Marlaine Smith, Peggy Chinn, project founder Sue Hagedorn, and many other influential leaders have about nursing and social justice. Nursing as a caring practice is to be emphasized, and caring is an emancipatory nursing practice. The Nurstory initiative is a medium that is ideal for delving more deeply into understanding this and ourselves.
Read Raeann’s paper on digital storytelling in social justice nursing education.