Is our student portfolio valued?

A student portfolio was introduced for pre-registration nursing students at the University of Glamorgan in October 1997. The impetus for doing so was the recognised need to address:the 'theory-practice' divide;the need to provide nurse students with skills that will enable them to maintain the Professional Profile for registration purposes (). This article reports a research study evaluating the student portfolio.

The whole story: towards an ethical research methodology.

In this paper Alex Carson and Gavin Fairbairn argue that closer links between nursing education, research and practice may be developed through the use of a narrative methodology. The debate is cited in the wider practical and political context of a more democratic model of healthcare delivery. The authors provide a rationale for the use of stories in both nursing research and nursing practice by suggesting that each rests upon an ethic of helping whole people, rather than simply amounting to a technical undertaking.

Writing about nursing research: a storytelling approach.

In this article Gavin Fairbairn and Alex Carson argue that much of what is written by nurses is needlessly difficult, especially when it concerns research they have carried out. The authors make a positive contribution to the ways in which nurses think about what they write and how they write it, suggesting that one way in which things might become better would be for nurses to view their writing as a form of storytelling.

The role of the nurse lecturer in the supervision of students' essays, projects and assignments: results of an all Wales questionnaire survey.

This study explores the role of the lecturer in nursing and midwifery education in the supervision of students' essays, projects and assignments. Three methods were used within the study; semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. The results from the semi-structured interviews were used to develop a questionnaire which was distributed to the population of lecturers in nursing and midwifery education (n=285) within Wales.