Community Engagement Leads to Professional Identity Formation of Nursing Students

Abstract

Professional identity formation is essential to nursing education. Knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values help form nursing students’ identity. Professional identity is a process of becoming independent and having self-awareness of one’s educational journey (All Answers Ltd., 2018). Maranon and Pera (2015) described that the contrast between didactic and clinical learning may play a role in the ambiguity that initiates nursing students about professional identity. There is a gap in the current research literature and has been underexplored with no intentional plan to address new areas (Godfrey, 2020; Haghighat, Borhani, & Ranjbar, 2020). The goal of professional identity formation is to develop well-rounded students with moral competencies who will blossom into future nursing leaders (Haghighat et al., 2020). The benefit to the community of producing well-rounded nursing students is safety and quality in their actions. This descriptive paper will address examples of how professional identity may be achieved by nursing students’ participation in community engagement such as attendance to professional conferences and intentional mentoring.

Keywords

• professional identity
• nursing students
• community engagement
• mentoring