Enhancing nursing education for Indigenous students: Indigenous nursing students' insights and strategies.

BACKGROUND: Indigenous nursing students contended with far-reaching challenges during the pandemic that significantly altered their experiences of nursing education. These experiences are poorly understood by nursing educators and strategies for Indigenous nursing student success rarely involve the insights of current Indigenous nursing students. AIM: The aim of this article is to offer Indigenous-student derived recommendations regarding strategies for improving their experiences and success within nursing education during the pandemic and beyond. DESIGN AND METHODS: This qualitative study employed an Indigenous methodology including land-based learning, ceremony, and sharing circles. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Indigenous nursing students (n = 17) from a Western Canadian school of nursing participated in one of three sharing circles. RESULTS: Indigenous nursing students recommended institutional and program adaptations along with increases to cultural safety for enhancing their experience in nursing education. Institutional and program strategies included: decreasing course loads and class sizes; an Indigenous-specific cohort; a transition program after course failure; increasing academic supports such as additional clinical skills and academic writing practice. Recommendations for increasing cultural safety included: mandatory and recurrent cultural safety training for faculty, staff and students; differential learning and evaluation strategies; and increased inclusion of Indigenous ceremonies and practices. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study provide insights that can help guide curriculum development, pedagogical approaches, and policy development to improve nursing education for Indigenous students.

Trauma and survivance: The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indigenous nursing students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in tremendous educational and health impacts for Indigenous peoples and communities. Yet, little is known about the impacts of the pandemic on Indigenous nursing students in Canada. Guided by an Indigenous conceptual framework and a qualitative sharing circle methodology, the interconnected personal, academic, and community impacts of the pandemic were explored with Indigenous nursing students (n = 17). Overall, the pandemic exacerbated and compounded prior traumas Indigenous students and communities have experienced across generations on Turtle Island. Participants suffered worsening psychological distress and significant losses during the pandemic, especially losses in learning and cultural safety. However, the pandemic also revealed silver linings including: the benefits of online learning; and demonstrations of posttraumatic growth, survivance, and community strength. These findings are relevant to informing culturally safe and trauma-informed strategies, policies, administrators, and educators in schools of nursing.

Exploring Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre as pedagogies in nursing education.

BACKGROUND: Concepts such as racism, oppression and social justice are critical curricular inclusions in nursing education. However, traditional approaches to nursing education often fail to produce the desired reflection and change amongst students. There is an urgent need to develop nursing educators that can step outside the rigidity of the curricular status quo and engage students with pedagogies that support critical reflection, analysis and action. Participatory, experiential and interactive theatrical methods rooted in critical pedagogy, such as Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and Forum Theatre (FT) may prove more effective at engendering reflection, analysis and action. OBJECTIVES: The study explores health care providers' (including nurses, nurse educators and allied health professionals) and nursing students' experiences, reflections and usefulness of TO and FT as nursing pedagogies. DESIGN: Influenced by Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, this study was conducted on a Western Canadian university campus. Two groups participated: one that included health care providers (HCP) (n = 8) and the second that included an audience of nursing educators and students (n = 7). HCPs participated in a two-day TO workshop, while nursing students participated as audience members in the FT performance. The data were drawn from sharing circles and group discussions and were analyzed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: The findings from HCPs revealed that TO represents an opportunity for reflection and growth; strengthening relationships; and practicing vulnerability. Given that students only participated as audience members, they described practical applications for using TO and FT as pedagogies in nursing education including in simulation and in theory-based courses. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that TO and FT can play an important role in supporting HCPs' development as critical educators through embodied and reflective practice and that nursing students endorse the application of TO and FT in a broad range of learning contexts.

An Indigenous and arts-influenced framework for anti-racist practice in nursing education.

In this article, we share an innovative framework using Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed along with Indigenous sharing circles as a pedagogical approach to explore racism with nurses, nurse educators and allied health professionals. Theatre of the Oppressed is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of participatory and improvisational theatre techniques and games to facilitate dialogue about the problems and oppression that people face in their own lives and to rehearse solutions for acting on these problems (Boal, 2002). The purpose of this article is to detail the methodology of our Indigenous and arts-influenced framework. Using select dialogue that emerged from participants in the workshop, we illustrate how Theatre of the Oppressed, along with Indigenous sharing circles facilitated conversations and raised awareness and consciousness regarding racism, and provided opportunities for health care providers to reimagine race and confront racism within their own practices.

Transdisciplinarity in Health Care: A Concept Analysis.

AIM: To analyze the concept of transdisciplinarity and provide an enhanced definition of transdisciplinarity in health care. BACKGROUND: The term transdisciplinarity is increasingly prevalent in health care research and has been identified as important to improving the effectiveness and efficiency in health care. However, the term continues to be misappropriated and poorly understood by researchers and clinicians alike which hinders its potential use and impact. DESIGN: Walker and Avant's (2005) method of concept analysis was used as a framework for the study of the concept. REVIEW METHODS: The databases PubMed, CINAHL, Academic Search Premier, PsycInfo and ERIC were used searching the terms transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity. RESULTS: Transdisciplinarity in health care involves transcending of disciplinary boundaries, a sharing of knowledge, skills and decision-making, a focus on real-world problems and the inclusion of multiple stakeholders including patients, their families and their communities. CONCLUSIONS: An enhanced definition of transdisciplinarity in health care emerged from this concept analysis that may provide clarity and direction for health care providers. Nurses, and other health care providers, can look to this definition to understand transdisciplinary health care teams as opposed to multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary ones.