Exploring Staff Nurses’ Perceptions of Nursing Student Enculturation Within Clinical Teaching: A Focused Ethnography

The traditional clinical education model in nursing has utilized on-site learning experiences in clinical settings with patient encounters. With the growing complexity and demands of contemporary nursing care today, it is imperative to question the principal assumptions that guide the design and use of traditional clinical teaching experiences. Staff nurses working with nursing students can illuminate the impact of sociocultural workplace factors on clinical teaching and learning when preparing students for practice. Yet there is little known about staff nurses’ perspectives of nursing culture and how enculturation prepares nursing students for the profession. By understanding the perceptions of enculturation among practice experts who teach nursing students in clinical environments, nursing professionals would gain insight about the culture of nursing and its effect on clinical teaching.A focused ethnography serves to explore the culture and interactions of the acute care learning environment where nursing students’ formation takes place, the staff nurse’s perceptions of enculturation of nursing students in practice and its effect on teaching in the traditional clinical education model. Data will be collected through ethnographic observation processes and through informant interviews conducted in-person until saturation is achieved. Thematic analysis will be used to analyze data and result in themes of staff nurses’ perceptions of enculturation and what they truly value as the crux of clinical teaching. Achieving insight from staff nurses who help students learn the culture of nursing and are closely aligned with the practice world will add valuable evidence and be foundational for future research to radically transform the traditional clinical education model.