Cultivating the Strategic use of Storytelling as an Advocacy Skill for Social Justice in Nursing Practice

Nurses are called to uphold and advocate for human dignity within care when threats arise. Despite this calling, deeply entrenched social injustices within care, such as racism, health inequities, and health disparities have persisted. Effectively addressing social injustices that threaten human dignity requires transformative change. Transformative change acknowledges, questioning, or reimagining underlying thinking and assumptions embedded within current beliefs and value systems, which are largely subconscious. Though most human thinking and decision making occurs subconsciously, or outside of one’s awareness, many strategies to address complex and evolving issues within nursing fail to target subconscious drivers of transformative change. The purpose of this scholarly project was to prepare faith and community nurses to cultivate storytelling as a skillset to mitigate common, subconscious barriers such as implicit biases and effectively advocate for social justice and transformative change. During a 2-hour workshop designed using concepts from Jean Watson’s Unitary Caring Science, nurses learned about the pervasive impact of implicit bias. Additionally, these nurses were guided through a storytelling framework designed to help them integrate and mitigate bias within storytelling development. As a result of the workshop, the participants felt that they had learned more about implicit biases and stated they were motivated to apply what they had learned within the workshop in their practice. This scholarly project prepared nurses with storytelling as a skillset designed to influence subconscious drivers of transformative change and advocate for social justice within nursing practice