Working with fragments

This image represents something of the nature of working with fragments from the mentor perspective.

Often, the mentor’s efforts were directed towards making sense of and giving form to the fragments in their lived experience. They applied their selves as creative beings, seeing patterns in the project of mentoring. It was not possible or even desirable to know the student as a whole entity in one moment of perception. They needed to build their knowledge of the student from the fragments that presented themselves piece by piece over time and in relations with others.

They came to know the student by observing their practice, having conversations, working alongside them, gettng to know them as individuals. As nursing requires practical as well as academic skills. the hands in this image are meaningful. Mentors find it very important that students learn the hands-on skills early on, even though as nurses they are often delgating this work to health care assistants. Many of them feel the tensions of wanting to carry out the direct nursing care, while at the same time being pulled towards the equally important management tasks.

Sometimes, students are welcomed in to the workplace as an extra pair of hands, or sometimes students have been reported as saying they feel like a spare part. There are many ways in which fragments feature in mentoring.

The meanings of place and time

Spring is late this year. The snowdrops are still in full bloom and the daffodils are yet to grace us with their show of bright yellow, even the early ones, so St David's day came and went in a more subdued way, botanically speaking, than in recent years. The waxing and waning of the seasons provides an anchor, a way of grounding human experience. Today is the "ides of March", the thought of which fills me with a tiny sense of forboding, but not being superstitious, I don't attach any real significance to this.

The idea of place and time as being meaningful is often uppermost in my thoughts as I work with my research data. The different environments in which nurses work have an enormous impact on how they experience their work and their mentoring. A busy surgical ward presents a range of opportunities, challenges and constraints to a mentor that are quite different from a rehabilitation unit or a community nursing team. Whatever the setting, they all experience certain things that frustrate their efforts to be a good mentor and can strain their relationships with students and colleagues, along with the things that make their work worthwhile and that they feel passionate about sharing with students.

The work context dictates the pace of the work. The experience of time is very different in the different contexts and time dictates the rhythms of the work, the priorities that are constantly juggled and the affordances available to mentors to be with and support their students. Physical space is also significant - whether they can physically see the student at any time; whether there is a space for a private conversation; or how close is too close when working together. How these mentors feel about being a nurse, and nursing, in the context of their own lives is often an overarching driver for how they approach mentoring.

Empathy in nurse mentors

One of the things that has really struck me as I carry out the initial interviews with mentors is the high level of empathy that mentors have for student nurses, patients and colleagues. The people I have interviewed so far are very experienced nurses who seem instinctively tuned in to other people and their feelings. I would like to find out more about what this means for mentors. How much of their empathy-led behavour are they conscious of labouring over, and how much is it authentic caring behaviour? Is it related to their identities as members of a caring profession? The notion of 'being-with' a student mentee is worth exploring in some depth. Sometimes, it is not about teaching or providing learning opportunities or other such actions; it is simply that they spend time together and may be inhabiting the same space at these times.

I am also interested in exploring further how mentors orient to colleagues. For instance, what are the emotional display rules amongst their colleagues with regard to mentoring? Mentors do seem to spend energy on complex interactions with colleagues, getting feedback on students, being mindful of the impact on the team of having a student, and so on.

How much of the time do mentors have to work hard at showing the 'right' emotion to students? If they are battling between heart and head when having to fail a student, how much of that do they let the student or others see? If they are relieved that a student has carried out a difficult procedure safely, does that show? I think these are all fascinating aspects of the 'hidden' lifeworld of the nurse mentor that I hope to discover.

Emotion as a social construct in the lifeworld

I've always started from the premise of studying thoughts and emotions and because they are not accesssible to a researcher by observation (although emotions can be but they can also be masked), I wanted to find out about them in dialogue with mentors. However, if I am assuming that emotion is socially constructed within the life world of a mentor, and if my focus is on the life world (as it is), then I can't really assume that emotions are internal to a person. A mentor's experience of emotion in carrying out the role will be in the context of social interactions, rationalisations and perceptions that are shaped by cultural, social and professional context. In dialogue, emotion and thoughts are mediated by language which imposes limitations on how they are and can be expressed.

I wonder how easy it is going to be for the mentors in my study to share with me how they experience their lifeworld. What other sources of data can inform my knowledge and understanding of the mentor's lifeworld? Could they capture their experience in a drawing or in some of the records they keep in the process of doing the job? Would it be feasible to ask mentors to reflect on the naturally occurring data that make up the lifeworld of mentoring and what would this add to the study?