Using Autoethnography as a Mechanism for Critical Introspection on Learning Journey Metaphors

As leader for an MSc Nursing module titled ‘Teaching, Learning and Leadership’, I wanted to facilitate international students in their reflection of learning across this module. Ultimately though, I wished to capture the degree to which education could have a transformative impact on the personal and professional development of my students by recording their reflections on the process of producing metaphors detailing their learning journeys. I would help them achieve this by aiding them to produce a reflexive visual narrative about their experience of learning. One thing I had to consider was education as a process of socially facilitating students in both their personal and professional development, so I opted for using metaphorical journeys as a means of students expressing their perceptions of this transformative change. I then used autoethnography as a methodological framework for capturing their reflections as an alternative method of reflection to those typically adopted in nurse education. This case study provides an insight into this approach, whereby particular emphasis was placed on acknowledging the controversial debates surrounding the potential use of autoethnography as a scientifically robust mechanism of capturing critical introspection. This approach also framed how the process of developing metaphors could provide a means of expressing individual insights and issues that would not be captured otherwise and was then formulated into a cogent discussion providing insight for educators considering an autoethnographic approach in their own work and for those interested in using metaphors in storytelling in the context of visual reflective narrative