Raccontare per formare il proprio sé professionale : la proposta della narrazione e della scrittura riflessiva nelle professioni della cura

Narration is a peculiar human skill, which offers individuals the instruments to understand the world, as well as their own actions and themselves. By narrating, individuals can be educated to critically reflect on the world and on their inner selves. Moreover, reflexivity proved an essential method to enquiry and understand complex situations – which occur in everyday healthcare practices. Not to mention that it facilitates learning from experience. Hence, educating healthcare professionals to reflexivity becomes a matter of major concern. Narrating and reflecting on the experience can help future professionals to adopt the patient’s perspective and to simultaneously begin to build his/her professional identity. Encouraging students to look back at their own personal experiences is essential to develop narrative skills. Personal life experience is the first story one can tell, a story from which much can be learned. Furthermore, listening to other people’s life stories (in novels or movies) can be very useful, since these accounts can be not only a source of reflection, but also of knowledge. This paper introduces an educational program for first year students of the Speech Therapy Degree of the University of Milan, which was based both on students’ narratives and on illness stories taken from novels and movies. This experience will be critically discussed in relation to students’ reflexive writings, which were used to evaluate the learning process.