Relational professionalism in nursing education: a qualitative study of nurse educators’ narratives of ethical formation and collective responsibility

Professionalism in nursing education is often discussed in relation to behavioural competence, ethical conduct and regulatory accountability. Such framings may underemphasise the relational and contextual processes through which professional identity is formed. This study examined how nurse educators in one South African public nursing education setting narrated professionalism and professional identity formation and interpreted these perspectives through an Ubuntu-informed relational lens. This qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and contextual study drew on five semi-structured focus group interviews with 44 nurse educators at one public multi-campus nursing education institution in South Africa. The interviews were originally conducted as part of a broader multi-phased project on Ubuntu-informed health sciences education, in which professionalism was not a primary domain of the interview guide. However, professionalism-related views were expressed across all five focus groups and formed a coherent analytic focus. This article reports a focused analytic strand embedded within the broader project, examining material concerning professional conduct, professional identity, role-modelling, ethical responsibility, educator–student relationships, assessment practices and institutional conditions shaping professionalism. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with primarily data-led coding followed by theoretically informed theme development. Ubuntu served as the primary relational interpretive lens, while decoloniality functioned as a critical orientation during interpretation. Nurse educators described professionalism as a relational ethical process whose enactment depended simultaneously on personal formation, relationships, pedagogical practice and institutional conditions. The analysis generated one overarching theme, Relational Professionalism as Ethical Formation and Collective Responsibility , supported by four interconnected subthemes: relational ethical formation; relational accountability; embodied pedagogical praxis; and communal responsibility shaped by institutional, curricular and structural conditions. The findings offer a contextually grounded, Ubuntu-informed interpretation of nurse educator professionalism and illuminate the limitations of exclusively compliance-oriented framings. Professional identity formation was represented as an ethical and relational process, while the enactment of professionalism was also shaped by institutional conditions. This interpretation may be relevant to nursing education contexts seeking to balance regulatory accountability with relational and culturally responsive professional formation. Not applicable.