Reflections of First Year Nursing Students: The Tango Tower Experience

Abstract

First year nursing students at Laurentian University are taught self-reflection in the first semester of their program and continue to practice these skills throughout the following years of the program to assist in further developing self-awareness. This promotes a beginning understanding of the self-assessment required for quality assurance of their own practice as mandated by the College of Nurses of Ontario (2015). The purpose of this research was to determine the personal learning and team building skills of first year nursing students participating in an outdoor challenge course, namely, the Tango Tower. The rationale for this research involved the idea that the outdoor challenge course presented a learning opportunity to enhance personal self-awareness and team building skills. This qualitative study involved nursing students who completed self-reflections focusing on how they felt before, during, and after the challenge course experience. 16 first year nursing students consented to have their self-reflections reviewed for this research. A thematic analysis of these reflections demonstrated that the students became more self-aware in how they encounter new situations, learned to trust peers, and improved their communication and team building skills. Implications of this research are that results may be used to inform educators and facilitators in promoting the use of the outdoor challenge course to facilitate student learning, and also to potentially enhance interprofessional student learning by having a variety of professional students involved in team building activities.

Keywords

• Outdoor Challenge courses
• nursing students
• team-building
• self-awareness