Storytelling : an innovative educational package for teaching midwives in Uganda

Abstract

Transformation and innovation have become especially important in nursing and midwifery education. Educators in this area need various pedagogical approaches beyond traditional strategies of teaching and learning to meet tomorrow’s health care delivery system challenges. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the use of storytelling as an innovative educational package for teaching midwives. Phase I subphase 1 includes an integrative literature review used to explore and describe the meaning of the concept ‘storytelling’ as a teaching strategy in midwifery education. Phase I subphase 2 explores the experiences of midwives in managing midwifery health care by analysing their reflective essays on incidents in their midwifery practice. A qualitative research approach using an interpretative phenomenology design was used, drawing on convenient sampling of fifteen (15) reflective essays from Phase I subphase 2. The participants were all final year midwifery students who had already learnt how to write reflective essays for their clinical case studies using the Gibbs Model of Reflection from learning by doing. Phase II developed four stories which had emerged from the four major themes of the reflective essays using Thaddeus and Maine’s Three Delay Model. The four themes are: delay in seeking care, delay in reaching health care, delay in receiving care, and no delays. Phase III validated the stories for accuracy, and for application as a teaching strategy with midwifery education experts. In Phase IV, the findings of both Phases I and II, were integrated. Four contextual real-life stories were analysed and from these an educational package using storytelling as an innovative teaching strategy for teaching midwives was developed. Field experts validated the storytelling package which provides step-by-step instructions for preparing midwifery educators for storytelling classroom sessions. Recommendations are provided for nursing and midwifery educators, the management of the nursing education institutions, other stakeholders such as the Uganda Nursing and Midwifery Council (UNMC) and government, on the inclusion of this innovative teaching strategy in the curriculum and training methods of academic and clinical courses.