Being a supportive presence in online courses: attending to students' online presence with each other.

As a teacher involved in distance education, being a supportive presence includes attending to and facilitating students' knowing and connecting with other. This creates places for learning that are safe, fair, and respectful, which reflects the concerns of the interpretive pedagogies (Diekelmann & Diekelmann, in press). Reflecting a larger issue is the importance of contemporary nurses' knowing and connecting with other team members, and with patients, online in ways that engender community and achieve desired outcomes. With this in mind, attending to the Concernful Practices that enable students to know and connect in ways other than face-to-face encounters becomes even more relevant in preparing for today's practice environments.

Being a supportive presence in online courses: knowing and connecting with students through writing.

Enacting Narrative Pedagogy, teachers often reflect on how practices, such as knowing and connecting, influence the nature of the experiences they co-create with students. There is a reciprocity in the tone of both students' and teachers' communication-in both classroom and online environments. Through attention to how teachers know and connect with students, the words and phrases they use can help put students at ease and preserve a continual future openness for learning. Without attention to how language "speaks" to students, especially in distance education, teachers perhaps, too often, "look through" experience to the outcomes of learning and do not address the potentially problematic nature of the experiences they co-create with students. Focusing attention on the meaning and significance of language in online learning restores the connective and gathering possibilities of written communication.

Students' voices: listening to their experiences in practice education.

The experiences of the students in this pilot study demonstrate how students are learning to respond to the call of the patient amid the challenges of contemporary health care settings. Perhaps these experiences make teachers mindful of how students learn to respond, listen to, and know and connect with patients for whom they care. How would clinical courses be different if listening to and connecting with patients (as the basis for personalizing care) was given the same priority as completing particular interventions or demonstrating particular skills? What does it mean to students to encounter situations in which patients are not being listened to or in which nurses have not connected with patients? Research in nursing education is showing how new, student-centered pedagogies arise when teachers shift attention from content, and linking content to practice, to equally exploring narrative experiences and how students and teachers spend their time together (Diekelmann & Smythe, 2004). The voices of students gathered in this pilot study suggest that students are perhaps our brightest hope for envisioning what to preserve and what to overcome as we reform and create compelling, student-centered practice nursing education.

A community-driven model of research participation: the Jackson Heart Study Participant Recruitment and Retention Study.

Recruiting African Americans for research participation is a recognized challenge. The aim of the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) is to recruit and retain 6,500 African-American participants to examine the risk factors and causes of heart disease in this ethnic group. A multi-method Participant Recruitment and Retention Study was conducted prior to initiating the JHS as a basis for designing a culture-specific plan for recruitment, retention, and adherence of participants. Probability and purposive sampling were used to select African-American adults aged 35-84 from the Jackson area. Data were collected using a structured survey (N=125) and in-depth interviews (N=31 individual; 10 group). Data were analyzed and interpreted using inferential statistics and interpretive phenomenology to identify participatory barriers and facilitators, and to uncover the meaning of taking part in research. Findings generated an emerging Community-Driven Model, which has potential to enlighten researchers about effective strategies for recruiting and retaining African Americans for research participation.