Becoming a Reflective Practitioner, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 9‘Reflections on Not Giving a Therapy’: Weaving Narrative Through Prose Poetry

Christopher Johns

Representing reflective learning or insights in narrative form can take diverse visual and verbal forms. Some of us have a natural leaning towards visual modes of expression and some of us lean towards verbal modes of expression. Indeed ‘finding the right words’ can be a frustrating and constraining force.

Wagner (1999) interviewed 18 nurses for their reflections of family impact on the dying experience. She reduced these experiences into a set of categories using fragments of the nurses’ reflections to justify each category. In doing so, I felt she lost the meaning in these nurses’ stories. However, she then re‐interpreted the nurses’ words into poetry – ‘as a way of knowing subjectively and inter‐subjectively the fullest meaning of the data’ (p. 21). Her poetry reflects a deeper level of interpretation beyond cognition; in my mind, it heals the story and makes it possible to connect with the experience because it is whole. Coleman and Willis (2015) facilitated nursing students to use poetry as reflective writing. They note that:

poetry writing give students the opportunity for freedom of expression, personal satisfaction and a closer connection with their patients which the more formal approach of reflective writing did not offer.

However, their comment came with the caveat ‘if students are to truly maximise the benefits of reflection and reflective writing, there needs ...