All real living is meeting: the task of international education in a nursing curriculum.

Abstract

Our experience suggests two significant benefits of shaping an international education focus in a nursing curriculum. First, a genuine understanding and appreciation of a foreign health care system is strengthened by identification of and confrontation with the socio-political context in which it is embedded. The second, and perhaps most fundamental benefit, is not so easy to verbalize. This involves the participant's personal confrontation with another culture. What is external, the experience of a foreign culture, translates into an encounter with the foreign territory of one's own thinking. The participant is challenged to overcome the traditional limitations of professional discipline, experience and vision and to move toward notions of world community and human solidarity. It seems to us that the development of concepts, resources and methods to move American nursing in the direction of greater solidarity with the world health care community is a legitimate task for nursing education.