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ERIC Number: EJ1447787
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Nov
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1382-4996
EISSN: EISSN-1573-1677
Transforming Self-Experienced Vulnerability into Professional Strength: A Dialogical Narrative Analysis of Medical Students' Reflective Writing
Eivind Alexander Valestrand; Monika Kvernenes; Elizabeth Anne Kinsella; Steinar Hunskaar; Edvin Schei
Advances in Health Sciences Education, v29 n5 p1593-1610 2024
Medical students' efforts to learn person-centered thinking and behavior can fall short due to the dissonance between person-centered clinical ideals and the prevailing epistemological stereotypes of medicine, where physicians' life events, relations, and emotions seem irrelevant to their professional competence. This paper explores how reflecting on personal life experiences and considering the relevance for one's future professional practice can inform first-year medical students' initial explorations of professional identities. In this narrative inquiry, we undertook a dialogical narrative analysis of 68 essays in which first-year medical students reflected on how personal experiences from before medical school may influence them as future doctors. Students wrote the texts at the end of a 6-month course involving 20 patient encounters, introduction to person-centered theory, peer group discussions, and reflective writing. The analysis targeted medical students' processes of interweaving and delineating personal and professional identities. The analysis yielded four categories. (1) "How medical students told their stories" of illness, suffering, and relational struggles in an interplay with context that provided them with new perspectives on their own experiences. Students formed identities with a person-centered orientation to medical work by: (2) "recognizing and identifying with patients' vulnerability," (3) "experiencing the healing function of sharing stories," and (4) "transforming personal experiences into professional strength." Innovative approaches to medical education that encourage and support medical students to revisit, reflect on, and reinterpret their emotionally charged life experiences have the potential to shape professional identities in ways that support person-centered orientations to medical work.
Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-460-1700; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2123/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A