Why would nurses be interested in my PhD findings?

Perhaps I  need to answer this question before moving on. I'm doing this study because I think it is important to promote and extend understanding of the mentor experience. Mentors are such a crucial part of the whole enterprise of educating new nurses. Practice skills cannot be learnt in the classroom. However, the work of mentors seems precariously dependent on goodwill.

There are risks to being a mentor - students can challenge your practice in a slightly misjudged way through their lack of experience; you are vulnerable to gossip around the university; you open up your workplace to students who may slow the pace of work; you feel guilty when you have to tell a student they are failing; you feel responsible for letting someone through who you have doubts about and hope they improve in their next placement.

You give generously of yourself to help students - your time, energy, patience, enthusiasm for nursing. Mentoring is an integral part of being a nurse, and the challenge of passing on what makes a good nurse is never an easy one. Sometimes it is felt or sensed, part of who you are, rather than something that is easily taught. You want students to adopt the values and approaches that you have come to value in your work.

By using hermeneutic phenomenology, I'm trying to interpret all these elements of being a mentor in a way that throws new light on the meaning of mentoring. Perhaps mentors are taken for granted a little too much. Perhaps we can learn a little more about the skill and personal involvement of mentoring that will help to enhance mentor preparation and support. Perhaps there are some answers to the perpetual puzzle of how people can be supported to learn in the workplace and how you should judge and assess workplace learning.

Fragments and hope

I was recently re-working my two findings chapters on the themes 'working with fragments and having a sense of the whole' and 'having hope for the nursing profession'. Whereas the theme of being aware of high stakes was analysed according to 'being-already-in',the fragments theme is focusing on 'being-amidst' and the hope theme is focusing on 'being-towards'.  At a distance, it has a very logical feel, but when digging into the data and vocative texts with these analytical filters it becomes a very hard task. Discussing narrative accounts of concrete events and more general dispositions towards mentoring relies on the use of data that is already spoken and representative of the experience. It is already removed from the actual experience. so, I have to consider whether a description of an event or of practice is really showing Dasein's falling, as in being-amidst or whether it is something else.

If working with fragments indicates being absorbed in coping, then it might also need to be linked to concepts of equipment use in terms of being ready-to-hand (in use) or present-at-hand (an object of contemplation). I think there are also things to be learnt from the differences in the different technologies, say, in the context of blood pressure measurements. What is the difference between taking manual blood pressures and using dynamaps and why does it  matter so much?

Being on the edge of something

I've written two sets of drafts of my findings chapters. First time around, I was approaching the writing from the perspective of being immersed in the data. Hence, there was not a strong narrative for the reader, even though when I was writing there was a perfectly logical flow of ideas. Second time around, I've made it more structured and added an interpretation of the findings through the lens of Heidegger's concepts of Dasein. However, I'm still struggling to nail down what makes this mentor study so special and so captivating for me. And, I haven't convinced my supervisors in my writing that the interpretations I've layered over the top, in terms of Dasein, are helpful. Still, I feel convinced that they are.  

First, in terms of attunement, facticity, affectivity and mood, all these words can be used to represent the idea of 'being-already-in',  that we have been 'thrown' into the world, so that we are 'always already' in a situation that is coloured by mood. I like the German word 'Befindlichkeit' that Heidegger used which can be translated as how you are finding things, or how it is with you.  In terms of attunement, we are attuned to our world by mood. We cannot escape or manipulate these primordial moods, they are facitically part of our existence. There's another layer of mood, that might be more easily thought of as emotion, that we notice and can be acutely aware of. We clearly do have some control over these. The world that the mentors are 'thrown' into is a world of high stakes. For all the different participants in the world of the mentor - students, patients, colleagues, the university,  employers and the professional body, the stakes are high. Whether or not they do a good job of educating their students matters greatly to everyone in different ways. The high stakes and mentoring mood combine into a potent mix.

Then, there is understanding, which is more about being capable, competent, having know-how, seeing the significance of situations, rather than a cognitive process that we commonly think of 'understanding' as.  Understanding discloses our existence, which itself can only be understood in terms of potentiality-for-being. Existence is always ahead-of-itself in a process of becoming. One understands something when one can cope with it, so that mentors understand mentoring through their competence at mentoring.  Mentoring is for-the-sake-of- something, which is to produce competent nurses for the future, which in turn keeps the profession strong and preserves the standards of care that the mentors value.



Being on autopilot - is this like inauthentic Dasein?

There's a jumble of ideas in the middle of all this. Mentors work with fragments of different sorts in a web of meanings, a referential whole. In their everyday engagement with their mentoring practice, when absorbed in coping, they assume a collective identity, or 'inauthentic self', a 'they-self', in which they are 'being what I am doing'. The role dominates, through accepted ways of practising, doing what you've learned to do in the role. Perhaps it is a kind of 'autopilot' in which you just get on and cope with things. This 'being-what-I-am-doing' covers up individual, authentic Dasein in a process of 'falling' away from itself. Equipment is 'ready-to-hand' most of the time, which means that it is used in context, but you might look right past the equipment to the work you're doing with it. I interpret 'equipment' quite loosely here, to refer to all the artefacts associated with nursing and helping a student learn the practice. If you stop to think about the equipment when it is not in use, or when you are not skilled at using it, it loses the direct meaningfulness that it had when you were using it. It then becomes 'present-at-hand', an object of theoretical contemplation. The implications for teaching and learning could be quite profound.

The use of language goes alongside all of these different ways of being-in-the-world. Language is used to signify meaning, allows one to articulate what one is doing. Sometimes, language can get in the way of the real Dasein, the who-I-am and how-it's-going-with-me, because it can only be a representation of Dasein's existence. We can understand at the level of the everyday talk, but this can hide, or put a veil over, the being underneath. However, we need to operate at this level in practice, or nothing would ever get done.