Storytelling as an educational strategy for midwifery students: A qualitative study

Abstract

Background: Narratives can provide a framework to teach the concepts of patient-centered care to the students. This article describes the experiences of midwifery students from employing of purposive storytelling as a teaching strategy in the education program. Material and Methods: This qualitative study used an in-depth interview method to collect the experiences of midwifery students engaged in a narrative medicine training program. The narrative-based teaching activities focused on three patients to teach four themes (clinical manifestations, treatment options, prevention strategies, and ethics), and related to MMR (maternal mortality rate) concept offered to students from Guilan University of Medical Sciences in 2022–2023. At the end of the course, all students were invited to provide experiences regarding the teaching method. Conventional content analysis was performed simultaneously with data collection. Four-dimension criteria (Lincoln and Guba) were used to evaluate the rigor of the findings. Results: Data analysis led to the extraction of three main categories and eight sub-categories: effective learning (extended learning, a safe learning environment, and boosted motivation for midwifery role), challenges on the way of learning (contagious sadness, shattered cohesion, and executive monopoly), and challenges on the way of performance improvement (the necessity of interdisciplinary education and the inevitability of a strong foundation). Conclusions: Narrative-based teaching may improve the learning experience of students, but it is not possible to train all the course content by this method, and it should ideally be a supplement to other educational methods, such as lecturing.