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Situated Immersion: An Experience of Dialogue

For me, the ability to dialogue is one of the oldest and most cherished of human activities. The engagement of one person with another in the mutuality of dialogue can be an enormously powerful force. Through a recent experience at the Institute of Human Becoming in Pittsburgh, I have come to realize that dialogue is at the heart of the process of teaching-learning. I am a doctoral student in nursing and am also engaged in a full-time nursing practice. Both of these roles demand ongoing learning. I recently found myself looking for the connections between the new knowledge I was learning in my student role, engaged with faculty and peers and reading textbooks, and that which was familiar to me in my role as an experienced nurse. The new knowledge I was discovering existed only as words in text and not as living knowledge with personal meaning in my life. I began to realize that for me to effectively integrate my doctoral learning with my familiar practice roles, I needed scholarly conversation grounded in the human exchange of ideas. What I was missing was a dialogue that connected me as a practicing nurse to the nursing theory I was learning in my student role. For me to have a living connection between nursing theory and nursing practice, I realized that I needed to be situated within a space and time for supportive learning while being immersed in studying a specific nursing theory. Through my lived experience of attending the Institute of Human Becoming in the summer of 1999, I was able to find an experience matched to my need for dialogue. This experience I have entitled “situated immersion.” Situated immersion connected me to a specific nursing theory, the theory of human becoming, which has transformed my nursing practice.