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Often the caregivers who work together underestimate the power of reconnecting with one's passion, caring about patients, and caring about each other. Caregivers can be students, faculty, nurses, and all staff in a nursing unit, long-term care facility, or college. At our midwestern college of nursing, we found a solution to reconnecting with our passion and building a caring environment by holding a Commitment to Care Celebration. This article describes our journey in the hope that it will help others design and create a similar caring experience unique to their own college, unit, or setting.
Concernful Practices
Our college has been using narrative pedagogy under the tutelage of Dr. Nancy Diekelmann and Dr. Pamela Ironside as one pedagogical approach to help educate nursing students. Narrative pedagogy is a way to share stories and interpret the lived experiences of student nurses (Diekelmann, 2003b ). At our Commitment to Care Celebration, we called forth stories of caring to help us think about and discover the ways we care for one another and to engender a community of learners to improve our learning environment (Diekelmann, 2003a ).
It is important to remember that narrative pedagogy "is not a strategy to be implemented but rather a way to create an environment within nursing education that invites teachers, students, and clinicians into converging conversations" (Dahlberg, Ekebergh, & Ironside, 2003 , p.28). This caring dialogue is based on Diekelmann's research of concernful practices of schooling learning teaching (Diekelmann & Diekelmann, 2009 ; Diekelmann & Ironside, 1998 ). The concernful practices are (Diekelmann & Diekelmann, 2009 , p. XVIII):
Presencing: attending and being open.
Assembling: constructing and cultivating.
Gathering: welcoming and calling forth.
Caring: engendering of community.
Listening: knowing and connecting.
Interpreting: unlearning and becoming.
Inviting: waiting and letting be.
Questioning: sense and making meanings visible.
Retrieving places: keeping open a future of possibilities.
Preserving: reading, writing, thinking-saying, and dialogue.
The articles in the reference list describe narrative pedagogy and the concernful practices. The following sections detail the site-specific way we enacted the concernful practices within our Commitment to Care Celebration.
Gathering: Welcoming and Calling Forth
The invitation for all to gather as one large group created the caring environment. Everyone at the college was welcomed to...