Background: The process of teaching cultural safety is emancipatory, focused on wider social relations and the context in which they arise. As teachers of cultural safety we are interested in the way that ideas are formed, held and changed. The aim of this research was to examine whether epistemological shifts were demonstrated by student nurses over one semester of cultural safety teaching/learning.
Method: We used NVivo software to analyse 34 student nurses’ reflective journals, applying a cognitive-developmental framework. The framework comprised three epistemological positions: dualism, relativism, and propositional, and two in-between locations that we called stretching.
Results: The results showed student movement between early epistemological positions, and students’ efforts to stretch to new, yet untried, ways of thinking.
Conclusion: In the classroom these shifts may be subtle thus paying careful attention to evidence that students are trying out new ways of thinking is essential. Appreciating that these small but significant shift are perhaps more important than ‘aha’ moments is crucial.