Troublesome mental health knowledge in a Western Canadian undergraduate nursing education program : student and faculty perspectives

Abstract

This project was conducted under the assumption that examples of troublesome knowledge exist in mental health nursing education curricula. The purpose of the project was to identify specific mental health content that nursing students and faculty identified as being troublesome and organized them using the definitions established by Perkins (1999) and Meyer & Land (2003). A sequential mixed methods research design was used to investigate nursing students and faculty member perspectives on troublesome mental health nursing content. Data were collected using surveys and focus groups and analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. From the project data, troublesome mental health nursing content was organized into five themes including the spectrum of mental illness, therapeutic relationships and boundaries, praxis, professionalism in nursing, and brain chemistry changes and management. Troublesome mental health nursing content was also organized according to troublesome form, revealing that students focused more on alien/foreign content and faculty focused more on tacit content. The student and faculty perspectives on troublesome mental health nursing knowledge are different. However, specific mental health nursing content was identified by all participants as being troublesome. This overlap consisted of troublesome knowledge for students with unresolved troublesome knowledge for faculty. To explain the learning examples collected during this project, a learning pathway was created, providing a visualization of the student's movement through the liminal spaces associated with learning troublesome mental health nursing knowledge.