Collaboration between first year undergraduate nursing students – A focused ethnographic study

AIM: The aim was to explore collaboration between first year undergraduate nursing students in a three-year bachelor program during clinical skills lab practices. BACKGROUND: The ability to collaborate is important in the nursing profession to ensure patient safety. Thus, efforts supporting nursing students with learning activities emphasizing this ability is crucial in nurse education as a preparation for the requirements of the nursing profession. Collaborative learning models are described as ways that support the students' interaction during education. However, collaboration between students has shown to have challenges such as negative competition and confrontations. This stresses the need to explore the collaboration between students to find ways to support the interaction. DESIGN: The study was conducted with a focused ethnographic approach. METHOD: Data were generated by participant observations during one semester, involving 70 h observation of 87 first year nursing students for 6 months and 24 training sessions in clinical skills lab practices. Two focus group discussions were used to elaborate students' views of collaboration and to provide an opportunity for follow up questions and interpretations from the observations. Field notes and focus group discussions were interpreted as one unit of analysis conducted with thematic network analysis. A global theme were synthesized from organizational and additional basic themes presenting the overall metaphor of the students' collaboration. RESULT: The global theme, Between adaptation and non-conformity, revealed a field of tension in the nursing students' collaboration. One the one hand, the global theme involved the students' ability to adopt to new knowledge and to being a nursing student in a clinical skills lab and to others' perspective. On the other hand, non-conformity creates a collaboration with less reflection between the students and non-synchronized and time-consuming laboratory work. CONCLUSION: Collaborative activities in nurse education fosters and challenges nursing students' collaboration required for clinical practices and later in the nursing profession. By the presented scaffolding efforts, nurse educators can arrange a learning environment that can support the collaboration between students and facilitate the transition into the profession.