An action research evaluation using films in a workshop for nursing clinical educators

Clinical nurse educators within Queensland, Australia, tend to be selected for the job based on their clinical expertise and consequently may lack knowledge of educational theories and practices. Within the Nursing School in which this project was based, there is interest in developing expertise in Transformative Learning theory. To share this knowledge with clinical educators, a workshop was designed using short films produced by the research team that focused on potentially transformative moments in clinical placement settings that the literature and the researchers’ experience had shown to be important. As the project developed iteratively through various stages, action research was chosen as the most suitable methodology to research and document the evaluation of this training workshop, which brought together 20 nursing clinical nurse educators. Interpretive data analysis approaches were employed to understand participants’ learning experiences resulting from the workshop, which led to four key themes: 1) first encounters with students need to be engaging and energising; 2) teach students how to bracket personal needs so they can provide professional empathic actions; 3) teach students to value both procedural- and person-centred care; 4) a transformative learning pedagogy is useful for clinical nurse educators to frame and enhance their teaching practice. Learning experiences produced using an action research methodology can stimulate clinical nurse educators to engage with and use relevant educational theory in ways that enable some of the more nuanced and affective dimensions of clinical training.