Sensibility in the Relations and Interactions of Teaching and Learning to Be and Do Nursing

Abstract

This qualitative study focused on proxemic feelings and feelings of detachment and ambiguity among professors-nurses concerning their experiences. This study aimed to reveal the meanings of sensibility held by being-professor-nurse in teaching and learning to be and do nursing. The theoretical-philosophical support is based on Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenological approach and the hermeneutics phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur was used. Nineteen professors-nurses from a Higher Education institution in the South of Brazil were interviewed between November and December 2006. Sensibility was revealed as the capacity to observe details in order to intervene in a situation the best way possible, and also as a way to break with exclusive models of the cognitive-instrumental rationality of science and technique, since sensibility is the basis for developing other ways of teaching and learning to be and do Nursing.