This presentation deals with narratives told by students of practical nursing in a weekly held study circle. Our aim is to discover the interactional devices that students use to construct themselves as morally and ethical integer actors. For that purpose, we use conversation analysis (Sidnell and Stivers 2013) as the method to analyze videotaped materials gathered during a three-year period. All students in our data are already working as nurses during their training time. In the practical professional life, the trainee nurses regularly confront interactions where they balance between two different and conflicting moral obligations: on the one hand, they have to maintain the goals of caregiving. On the other hand, they have to stick to the rules of ethically and morally correct caregiving taking into account the patients' right to self-determination, which may contradict the general goal of care.
We are interested in sequences of talk, namely narratives, as interactional devices to share and contextualize daily experiences through them (Ochs and Capps 2001), in which the students topicalize care situations that tackle the borders of ethically and morally adequate caregiving. We focus on the way the students describe their agency and how they justify actions (Enfield 2011). We found that in reporting challenging situations, the students 'narratives can make the voice of a resisting person audible, yet they have their own caretaking voice available for demonstrating their capacity for good caretaking.
The students were observed to use different ways of making knowledge claims (Ryle 1945; Arminen and Simonen 2021) in the context of storytelling. The claims in the evaluation sequence of storytelling were found to summarize the motives and reasons for their actions in two ways. On one side, the students refer to institutional rules derived from their nursing education: the knowing-that. In these cases, the students mention a generally accepted necessity of caregiving in order to justify their way of acting. On the other side, students refer to their own understanding of procedural rules of nursing as they present themselves as integer and competent actors: the knowing-how.
To conclude, we observed that the experience of crossing boundaries differently depends on the moral load of the reporting context (Buttney 1998). The narratives serve the students to demonstrate competence and to position themselves as good workers and caregivers.
References
Arminen, Ilkka & Mika Simonen 2021. Expertise as a domain in interaction. Discourse Studies, 23(5), 577-596.
Buttny, Richard 1998. Putting prior talk into context: Reported speech and the reporting context. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1), 45-58.
Enfield, Nick 2011. Sources of asymmetry in human interaction: Enchrony, status, knowledge and agency. In Stivers et al (eds.), The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 85-312.
Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps 2001. Living narrative. Massachusetts / London: Harvard University Press.
Ryle, Gilbert 1945. Knowing how and knowing that: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46: 1‒16.
Sidnell, Jack & Tanya Stivers 2013 (eds.). The handbook of conversation analysis. Wiley-Blackwell.
