When life experience matters: A narrative exploration of students' learning in nursing education

The gap between “theory” and “practice” is a much-debated issue in nursing education, and one of the challenges is to strengthen the coherence between the theoretical content of the education programme and the student's practical experiences. The students' life experience, understood as experiences from their non-professional sphere of life, has not been assigned sufficient attention in the discussions on the theory–practice relationship. This article presents a qualitative study with a narrative approach and a socio-cultural perspective on the students' learning process. The question focused on how first-year students perceive and reflect on the relationship between their life experience and the content of the nursing education. The results prove how students use stories in a meaning-making process to bridge the gap between their own life experience and the nursing curriculum. The students' storytelling creates a narrative coherence, but at the same time their ability to make these connections appears to be an unexplored resource in teaching. Hence, the paper concludes that the students' life experience represents an unexplored potential in nursing education.