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.

Understanding and barriers to formation Professional Identity among current and recent graduates of nurses and midwifery in two universities in a low resource setting: A qualitative study

“…The participants stated that nurse educators not following them to the clinical area affected their PI formation, and they felt that the mentorship was inadequate. Nursing faculty should always aspire to role model professional behaviour in a variety of ways and provide nursing students with multiple opportunities to hone their professional identity [ 14 ], Professional mentoring of students is important because mentoring models professional behaviours [ 14 ]. This is in line with a study done in China, which found that Professional identity and clinical teaching behaviour were negatively related to transition shock.…”