The Making of a Nurse

Conceptual Framing and Rationale

Becoming a nurse involves more than acquiring clinical knowledge and skills. It also involves discovering how personal experiences, values, strengths, and abilities come together within a professional identity. Meaningful encounters with patients, influential mentors, difficult moments, and everyday acts of care can shape nurses’ understanding of who they are, what they bring to the profession, and where they belong. Within the demands and uncertainty of healthcare, opportunities to reflect on these experiences can be difficult to find.

This ongoing project in the Faculty of Nursing uses digital storytelling to create space for that reflection. Developing a story through words, images, music, and metaphor invites nurses to explore the experiences that have shaped their practice and sense of purpose. Sharing these stories opens opportunities for others to consider their own journeys, encounter different ways of being a nurse, and learn from the experiential wisdom of colleagues across generations.

Research Question and Objectives

The project asks: How do nurses make sense of the experiences that shape their professional identity, and how might creating and sharing digital stories deepen understanding of purpose, confidence, and belonging in nursing?

It aims to explore the moments, relationships, and mentors that shape nursing identity; illuminate how nurses bring their unique strengths and abilities into their professional practice; and understand how they find and sustain meaning within challenging healthcare environments. It also considers how sharing these reflections can pass knowledge between generations and support others in finding their place within the profession.

Methodology

The project brings together nursing students, professors, preceptors, and other nursing professionals working across Alberta’s healthcare system through ongoing digital storytelling opportunities. Participants will create short first-person digital stories about experiences that have influenced who they are becoming as nurses. Stories may centre on a defining encounter, an influential relationship, a challenge, a turning point, or an ordinary moment that has taken on deeper significance.

Through facilitated reflection, story development, and production, participants will consider what these experiences mean and how to communicate them to others. The process will support participants in connecting personal strengths, values, and experiences with their nursing practice. Shared screenings and facilitated conversations will provide opportunities to reflect on the stories together, exploring both the distinctiveness of individual journeys and the experiences that connect nurses across roles, settings, and generations.

Significance and Contribution

The project approaches nursing identity as something that continues to develop through experience, relationships, and reflection throughout a career. It makes visible the personal and relational dimensions of nursing that can be difficult to communicate through formal instruction alone, including how nurses develop confidence, recognize their contributions, and find work that aligns with their strengths and values.

By connecting personal reflection with shared learning, the project creates opportunities for knowledge to move between students, educators, preceptors, and practising nurses. It also invites a fuller understanding of what helps nurses thrive within demanding and sometimes chaotic environments, while making room for uncertainty, struggle, and the conditions that can support or undermine meaning and belonging.

Anticipated Outcomes

The project is expected to develop a growing collection of participant-created digital stories reflecting diverse nursing experiences across Alberta, alongside opportunities for shared screenings and dialogue. These stories and conversations will offer insights into professional identity, mentorship, confidence, and the ways nurses find and sustain purpose in their work.

With participants’ consent and approval, stories may contribute to nursing education, preceptor development, professional learning, and future research. Together, these activities aim to preserve and share experiential wisdom, encourage reflection across career stages, and help current and future nurses recognize the unique contributions they can make to the profession.