Parasocial Activity: Nurse Learner's Experience of Entertainment Education

This paper aims to disseminate the findings of my doctoral research study exploring student experience of an innovative pedagogy, entertainment-education in the online learning environment. In the light of recent reports that question nurses’ capacity to care and their ability to manage the emotional challenges of practice, pedagogical approaches that can influence nurses’ clinical knowledge and promote caring attitudes are needed. New pedagogical approaches within nurse education are beginning to emerge and stories, simulation and online learning are being adopted to ensure safe and supportive learning experiences for nurses and their patients. In this concurrent session, I will report on my doctoral study which explores the experiences of registered nurses learning through the innovative use of a pro-social pedagogy called entertainment-education in the online learning environment. I will identify how nurses learned from entertainment education characters as if they were real people: a process I have called parasocial learning. I will discuss the significance of the emotional response to characters and storylines within entertainment-education to the parasocial learning process. I will argue that rather than protecting students from difficult emotions in educational settings as some author’s recommend, entertainment-education can be used to help students acknowledge difficult emotions and work with them as part of their professional development. In my study I discovered that the parasocial relationships students built with entertainment-education characters occupied the same social space as real people. I will discussed how students used these parasocial relationships in to translate theory into practice and work towards enhancing the quality of personal practice and service delivery In concluding I will recommend that entertainment-education is an effective pedagogical approach for providing safe and supportive vicarious learning experiences for nurses that can help them to build relationships with patients, manage the emotional challenges of care and translate theory into practice at an individual and social level.

https://www.rcn.org.uk/