Arts Analysis in the Danish Nurse Education

This article outlines ideas and results of a design-for-learning experiment, involving arts analysis in the nurse education in Denmark. The original purpose of the experiment was to investigate new ways of supporting personal knowledge building and building of professional judgement skills for nurse students, according to a phenomenological approach to learning. The results and learning outcome for the students however surprisingly showed that arts analysis had a very clear impact on the nurse students being creative in their building of personal and professional knowledge. The experiment suggests that arts can be seen as a medium for training what could be termed ‘relational creativity’ as a basis for professional judgement. Relational creativity is not an established theoretical concept, but the article argues that the term might have significance not only to nurse students, but also to new ways of thinking about knowledge, professional judgement and learning perspectives in relational professions in general.