Trying something new: Understanding the common practices of reforming nursing education

Abstract

What are the common reforming practices of teachers when they reform nursing education? How is cultivating thinking an important reforming practice in nursing education that moves beyond teaching “critical thinking?” Do the Concernful Practices of Schooling Learning Teaching reveal reforming practices that illuminate engendering community as central to creating and sustaining innovation? This interpretive phenomenological and Heideggerian hermeneutical study describes two themes (common practices) of reforming nursing education: Cultivating Thinking and Enacting the Concernful Practices: Making Visible How Innovation Arises. A pattern, Unlearning and Becoming, one of the Concernful Practices, was of central importance in this study. It describes how teachers and students seek experiences where they unlearn past pedagogical practices and explore new ways of thinking and creating egalitarian communities in reforming nursing education.

This study was part of a larger multi-media distance desktop faculty development study in the interpretive pedagogccs conducted by Dr. Nancy Diekelmann at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing. In the Diekelmann study, “trying something new” emerged as a common practice describing pedagogical reform. In my dissertation research, I extend Diekelmann's research by investigating “trying something new” through interviewing 15 teachers and 9 students in nursing education for their experiences of reforming in nursing education. The data I collected and hermeneutically analyzed revealed the two themes, and the pattern described in this study, and proffer reforming practices that teachers and students can extend, enhance, and sustain. Conversely, my study offers new understandings of reforming practices teachers and students should abolish because they are oppressive, disparaging, and impede reform.