Creating an inclusive science for nursing education.

Abstract

NO ONE WOULD ARGUE that research-based nursing practice is not needed or that there should not be a science of nursing. That would be an anathema. Yet, how are students best prepared for practice in ways that reflect the research base of our discipline? There is a nascent and increasingly sophisticated emerging science for nursing education that makes research--based teaching and practice possible. However, the challenges to creating a science of nursing education are substantial. With no funding available from the National Institute for Nursing Research and the need to go outside the discipline for funding, grants are often small, resulting in studies that are rarely generalizable or replicable. There was a time, in the not so distant past, when the same could be said about nursing research addressing clinical problems. Cadres of nurse scholars once pushed for funding, controlled by the profession, to ensure that both current and future nursing practice would be research based. These efforts were substantial. They occurred while scholars and scientists pooled their resources and struggled to work together in grass-roots research that began to define the phenomena of concern and to demonstrate the potential for clinical nursing research to influence future patient care. Perhaps efforts to create an inclusive science of nursing education reflect the discipline's ongoing commitment to research that informs our practice. We are responding now as we did then. The need for substantive funding to support nurse researchers who struggle to sustain educational research programs is imperative. Without funding for educational research, assistant professors, many with recent PhDs, must develop clinical research programs in order to get funding, establish a research trajectory, and secure tenure. Senior nurse researchers are being called to develop sustained educational studies using the methodological sophistication of their clinical research programs. Without tenured faculty studying nursing educational issues over time, the discipline loses the collective wisdom and expertise of senior faculty members and research into preparing future generations of nurses becomes haphazard and of limited utility. The lack of a sustained funding stream in nursing education further precludes examining educational issues over time, from multiple perspectives and using multiple methods. An inclusive science of nursing education demands this level of research expertise to provide an evidence-based nursing education. The discipline also must begin to more actively challenge the belief that research in nursing education is not nursing research but educational research (best conducted within the discipline of education). This belief is based on the assumption, for example, that teaching merely involves taking a learning theory from higher education and applying it to a nursing course with nursing students. Furthermore, while in higher education there are a handful of learning theories, even in the discipline of education the practice of teaching remains largely undertheorized, and a research base for the discipline is likewise depauperate. Calls for an inclusive science of nursing education are becoming more frequent (1,2) as the discipline faces substantive challenges in both academic and practice settings. The call for a science of nursing education resonates and provides an opportunity to study teaching and learning as a disciplinary practice. That is, it allows for the exploration of theories from higher education to shape and inform nursing education as well as to discover and develop pedagogies for nursing education that shape and are shaped by nursing practice. One such pedagogy, Narrative Pedagogy, was developed from studying how nursing teachers, students, and clinicians actually teach and learn nursing (3). Continuing to investigate the practices of schooling, learning, and teaching will further increase our disciplinary understanding of the nature of teaching and learning in nursing and offers a view of research in nursing education that is consistent with the definition of nursing research. …