Integrating Digital Literacy, Storytelling, and Representation in Nursing Education
According to Dahya (2017), digital media production allows learners to explore voice and representation within education. Her feminist ethnography demonstrated that when students create digital content, social power, culture, and gender shape how their voices are expressed and understood. Dahya emphasized that educators should intentionally design digital learning spaces that promote equity, authenticity, and inclusion, ensuring marginalized voices are represented.
According to Kim and Li (2021), digital storytelling facilitates reflection, learning, and identity development by allowing students to integrate multiple modes such as sound, text, and images. Their research found that storytelling helps learners express emotions, connect academic knowledge to personal experience, and explore their identities. The study demonstrated how digital storytelling can motivate students and enhance learning outcomes through creativity and self-expression.
Together, these studies highlight that digital literacy extends beyond technical skills. It involves reflection, ethical awareness, creativity, and inclusivity—qualities that are central to effective nursing education and practice.
Application in Post-Secondary Nursing Education
In post-secondary nursing education, these frameworks offer practical strategies for integrating digital literacy with reflection and ethical awareness. Digital storytelling can be embedded into nursing courses to help students connect theory to lived experience. For example, nursing students could create short digital stories based on clinical simulations, focusing on patient care ethics, communication challenges, or cultural humility.
Building on Churchill (2020), mobile technology can be used to capture video reflections, patient education materials, or interprofessional collaboration projects. These activities strengthen students’ digital and professional communication skills.
Drawing from Dahya (2017), it is essential that digital storytelling assignments promote equitable representation. Educators should encourage nursing students to reflect on diverse patient perspectives and global health issues while considering how their own voices contribute to healthcare equity. Assignments that explore Indigenous health, mental wellness, or social determinants of health can foster empathy and inclusion.
According to Kim and Li (2021), digital storytelling provides a platform for learners to construct professional identity and express compassion through creative engagement. Incorporating storytelling into reflective journals or practicum evaluations can help students articulate emotional experiences and personal growth, reinforcing both self-awareness and clinical competence.
Application in Hospital and Healthcare Settings
Within healthcare and hospital environments, these concepts support continuous learning, empathy, and communication across diverse teams. Churchill (2020) identified how mobile storytelling tools enhance collaborative learning and reflection. In clinical education, nurses could use brief video or audio stories to document quality improvement projects, patient education successes, or ethical decision-making scenarios. Sharing these narratives in professional forums or huddles promotes shared learning and patient safety.
According to Dahya (2017), storytelling can also amplify underrepresented voices within healthcare teams. Hospitals can integrate digital storytelling initiatives that allow nurses and allied health professionals to share experiences that reveal systemic challenges or cultural insights. This approach supports inclusion and fosters understanding across diverse workforces.
Kim and Li (2021) found that storytelling enhances identity development and motivation. In hospital education programs, digital storytelling can help staff reflect on their professional growth and reinforce compassion-centered care. For example, nurses might create digital stories that portray patient interactions, focusing on empathy, ethics, or interdisciplinary teamwork. Such storytelling reinforces professional identity and builds a culture of emotional intelligence within healthcare teams.
Implications for Nursing Education and Leadership
Integrating digital storytelling and critical digital literacy in nursing education cultivates reflective, compassionate, and technologically capable practitioners. Academic and clinical educators can use these approaches to bridge theory and practice, enhance communication, and promote equity in healthcare learning environments.
When nursing education aligns with the insights of Churchill (2020), Dahya (2017), and Kim and Li (2021), it produces graduates who are both digitally fluent and socially conscious. These frameworks demonstrate that digital literacy in nursing is not limited to technical proficiency but extends to ethical awareness, creativity, and human connection. This approach prepares nurses to lead with empathy, communicate across cultures, and navigate a healthcare system increasingly defined by technology and diversity.
My experience as a nurse and clinical leader has shown me how deeply storytelling is woven into healthcare practice. Every shift, nurses communicate complex emotions, ethical decisions, and patient care challenges that shape who we become as professionals. Bringing that lived experience into education allows me to design learning activities that are not just about meeting competencies, but about developing reflective and compassionate practitioners.
In post-secondary nursing education, digital storytelling can be a powerful way to help students connect their classroom learning with real-life practice. When I share clinical scenarios drawn from my own experiences, such as navigating communication barriers with families or making difficult ethical decisions, students begin to see the human dimension of nursing beyond the technical skills. Encouraging them to create short digital stories based on simulations or clinical placements helps them process these experiences through reflection. It allows them to explore empathy, cultural awareness, and professional values while also building digital literacy and communication skills.
In clinical settings, my leadership role gives me opportunities to see how digital storytelling can strengthen team learning and morale. For example, when staff share short video reflections about successful patient outcomes or lessons learned from challenging cases, those stories create a shared sense of purpose and emotional connection across the team. They also open space for dialogue about ethical issues, teamwork, and patient advocacy. This practice aligns with the kind of inclusive and reflective pedagogy described by Churchill (2020), Dahya (2017), and Kim and Li (2021), where learning is multimodal, human-centered, and grounded in diverse perspectives.
However, my experience has also made me aware of the barriers to implementing these approaches. Nurses in both education and practice often work under significant time pressures, and not all are comfortable using technology for self-expression. Facilitating this kind of reflective storytelling requires trust, psychological safety, and an environment that values vulnerability and authenticity as much as efficiency.
When educators and clinical leaders draw on their own experiences to model these values, digital storytelling becomes more than an assignment. It becomes a way to humanize technology and strengthen professional identity. It reminds both students and practicing nurses that reflection, empathy, and ethical awareness are not just soft skills. They are essential to safe, compassionate, and equitable care.
Churchill, N. (2020). Development of students’ digital literacy skills through digital storytelling with mobile devices. Educational Media International, 57(3), 271–284.
Dahya, N. (2017). Critical perspectives on youth digital media production: “Voice” and representation in educational contexts. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(1), 100–111.
Kim, D., & Li, M. (2021). Digital storytelling: Facilitating learning and identity development. Journal of Computer Education, 8(1), 33–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-020-00170-9
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