Teaching the ideas of others: Is there a problem?

Abstract

University-based nurse educators introduce students to ideas that have their genesis in non-nursing disciplines (e.g. biology, ethics, pharmacology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc.). These ideas are, on occasion, transformed during or following migration into nursing.When this happens, while an idea may retain the same descriptor, the meaning it comes to carry in nursing no longer matches that assumed in the originating discipline. 'Phenomenology' might be an example of this. Arguably, in nursing, some forms of phenomenology either have or are becoming something other than identically named research and scholarship conducted outside nursing. Transformed or transforming ideas of this type are not discussed here. Instead, problems attending the use of ideas that continue to signal referents derived from nonnursing disciplines are explored. Specifically, it is proposed that when nurse educators use ideas obtained from non-nursing disciplines in teaching, if subject expertize is required to understand ideas at levels corresponding to or commensurate with university instruction, and if expertize is associated with accredited learning, where enlisted ideas maintain their original meanings (i.e. original according to the home discipline), nurse educators who lack first degrees in the subjects they take ideas from may use ideas in teaching they do not adequately comprehend. To make sense of this somewhat convoluted and tautological claim I draw on personal experience. | THEN AND NOWA great deal of joy accompanied my student days. However, university life proved disappointing. By example, at some point we were introduced to Talcott Parsons' concept of the sick role. A hand goes up and a question is posed. At this distance I cannot remember what was asked. I do recall what followed. Our tutor became exasperated. She was reading off slides provided by someone else. She could not respond to inquiries about the content being delivered, and she was cross at being interrupted. This, I thought, was not education worthy of the name and since several people made excuses and left, others presumably reached the same conclusion.Jump forward 30 plus years. I now work in education and one of my colleagues is introducing first-year undergraduate students to the concept of holism. 1 That is, crudely, the idea that nurses need to consider more than the disease or physiological problem patients' 1 Neither key example employed in this paper identifies my current institution.

Whither nursing philosophy: Past, present and future

“…Perhaps such deeper exploration of ‘what is nursing’ is best left until postgraduate study, and while this is tempting, it does not encourage the development of analytical skills in undergraduates that I have so far been arguing for. In a paper published this year, Martin Lipscomb (2022) draws a helpful distinction between

‘teaching focused on getting students to do or think things meeting preordained outcomes and teaching focused on forms of comprehension that do not necessarily require practical or concrete instantiation in prescribed action/belief’.

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Complexity and ambition in nurse education

“…However, removed from practice, clinical or field‐specific knowledge quickly ossifies. And when nurse educators introduce students to ideas derived from the disciplines of biology, ethics, pharmacology, psychology, sociology and so forth—that is, knowledge derived from the sciences and forms of understanding referred to earlier, subjects with extensive hinterlands of dynamic evolving understanding, then because they are primarily nurses, educators will not also be subject experts if by expertise we (somewhat tautologically) mean someone who has a higher degree, or even just a degree, in the nonnursing subjects being taught (Lipscomb, 2022b).…”