“Transition in and between Discourse Communities: One Nurse’s Struggle”

by Terri Cole | Xchanges 9.2

Findings: Lena’s Cycle of Transition

Expectation

As mentioned previously, the expectation stage is where Lena envisions herself working in a professional setting and either experiences apprehensions or idealizations about her working environment and her role in that working environment.

Lena’s desire to take a step toward a career path emerged directly out of college. Her feelings about becoming a nurse, in general, were somewhat apprehensive when I interviewed her. Lena states: “I was extremely nervous about starting my job at Sherwood Hospital. First, it was the start of my career and I was unsure what was expected of me. I felt unprepared and scared.” She demonstrates insecurities about applying her skills to the workplace and fears that she had not acquired enough knowledge to do her job well. For Lena, writing in the workplace was not something she even gave thought to. Despite the fact that she states “I feel with all the schooling I’ve had that writing is like second nature to me,” Lena does not identify herself as a workplace writer and does not actually enjoy writing.

Disorientation

The disorientation stage is where Lena becomes disoriented and frustrated. She experiences a sense of alienated independence, where she feels she is expected to know unspoken guidelines and do things on her own. She also goes through two processes which I classify as negotiating priorities and negotiating audience.

Alienated independence: Lena’s training period at Sherwood Hospital lasted twelve weeks. However, Lena claims that documentation was not a strong focus of her training. In fact, the first time she engaged in documentation as a nurse was the first time she cared for a patient. Lena’s frustration began after her training process, when she began to feel that she was suddenly expected to know the unspoken guidelines of documentation.

Lena’s alienated independence was furthered when she made note that the Care Plans she used to write for college are not the same she has to write for the workplace:

Most of the academic writing that I did [in college] was nursing Care Plans and occasionally research papers. The Care Plans varied from professor to professor, but for the most part they had similar formats…We were expected to make individualized Care Plans and have measurable outcomes. At Sherwood, these Care Plans are pre-made for us and we just have to print out which Care Plans fit the circumstance and check off boxes that say we have performed these nursing interventions. I feel like now in the real world, Care Plans are general for each patient and not as specific to the person.

Essentially, Lena’s situation relates to Gee’s (1989) discussion on discourse when he explains that if one is having difficulty adapting to a discourse community “they can use another perhaps related, secondary Discourse” (p. 6). The related secondary discourse would be Lena’s academic discourse, which is supposed to prepare her for the nursing community she is currently in. Yet the Care Plans are no longer individualized and the documentation has resulted to check boxes instead of narrative space. Subsequently, Lena lacks an authority she once had when performing Care Plans in the academic community.