Mission possible: twenty-five years of university and college collaboration in baccalaureate nursing education.

In Canada, nurse educators from five postsecondary institutions in the province of British Columbia established a collaborative nursing education initiative in 1989, with a vision to transform RN college diploma programs to baccalaureate degree programs. The principles, processes, and structures that served to develop and sustain this nursing education initiative are briefly reviewed. Curriculum, scholarship, and education legislation serve as platforms to critically explore a 25-year history (1989-2014) of successes, challenges, and transitions within this unique nursing education collaboration. The importance of curriculum development as faculty development, program evaluation as an adjunct to pedagogical scholarship, diversity of cross-institutional mandates, political interplay in nursing education, collegiality, and courageous leadership are highlighted. Nurse educators seeking to create successful collaborations must draw upon well-defined principles and organizational structures and processes to guide pedagogical practices and inquiry while remaining mindful of and engaged in professional and societal developments.

Sharing with the land of the dancing lights.

In this article, the authors discuss some of their experiences with an innovative project that involved a group of faculty engaged in a collegial model of mentorship through the use of distance technology. In 2001, Aurora College in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, entered into contract with the Collaborative Nursing Program (CNP) in British Columbia to develop a four-year BSN program. The contract included a curriculum development and faculty mentoring package for each year of the new program. In preparation for implementing the first year of the new curriculum, a mentoring partnership was set up involving the Aurora faculty who would be teaching the first three faculty members from the CNP sites at North Island College in Courtenay, University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops and Selkirk College in Castlegar. Aside from the initial two-day face-to-face workshop in Yellowknife and the occasional meeting of individuals at nursing conferences, mentoring took place across the miles, via teleconferencing and e-mail. At the end of the one-year project, all participants felt energized and enriched by the experience.

Participatory inquiry with a colleague: an innovative faculty development process.

Clinical evaluation is central to the aims of nursing education; however, little has been written about the actual evaluative practices of nurse educators and the sources of influence on those practices. In this article, we describe our experience as co-investigators into the evaluation practices of one of us (J.A.J.) and overview some of the challenges and opportunities of participatory inquiry. We describe how J.A.J.'s involvement in this research project encouraged her to explore her evaluative practices in a meaningful way, which moved her to a place of deeper understanding about her work and transformed her as a nurse educator. As a result of this study, we are convinced of the necessity for a faculty development process whereby colleagues commit to a critical inquiry process focused on identifying each other's evaluative practices and sources of influence on those practices. In addition, schools of nursing can encourage faculty participation in peer development by adopting an expanded view of scholarship in which the disciplined examination of one's evaluative practices is accepted as evidence of the scholarship of teaching.