Nursing students’ international placement experience: an arts-informed Narrative Inquiry

Research shows that high cultural competence is most often acquired through both the theoretical education and the practical experiences within the international contexts. The purpose of this project evaluation was to learn from four undergraduate nursing students, who spent three-months in a Brazilian community, how they experienced their international placement. Students’ emotive responses to their international placement were elicited using the creative Narrative Reflective Process, which is informed by the Narrative Inquiry qualitative framework. This process included stories, memory box, metaphor and drawing, and creative writing. The generated creative data were reflected upon by the participants and key narrative threads teased out. The overarching findings speak to the transcultural exchange that took place: students went to teach the local population of Brazil about the social determinants of health from the Canadian perspective, while in turn learning life lessons from their hosts that enriched their personal and professional ways of being.