The viewing room: A lens for developing ethical comportment

• Transformative learning emphasizes inequities in healthcare practices that require ethics-based action from nurses.
• Film can be a vehicle to prompt transformative learning in students and development of ethical comportment.
• Exemplars illustrate how educators can approach development of ethical comportment in ways that are applicable to practice.

Healthcare is dynamic and complex, and against this background, nursing students must negotiate the transition from lay person to healthcare professional. Diverse life experiences and learning styles can further complicate this journey of transformation. The contemporary role of the nurse includes caring for and making clinical decisions about patients based on ethical principles. Learning about and integrating ethical comportment as part of the transformative journey requires nurse educators to create and implement learning experiences that challenge nursing students to think deeply and broadly about the experiences they encounter, to question their previous assumptions and prejudices, to consider the world of healthcare through a new lens, and to reflect on and learn from the process. The judicious use of film has the potential to assist students to recognize and develop ethical comportment as they prepare for real-world clinical practice experiences. In this paper, we present three film exemplars and related teaching strategies designed to facilitate transformative learning and development of ethical comportment.