Stigma and Developmental Disabilities in Nursing Practice and Education.

Individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) experience stigma, discrimination, and barriers, including access to appropriate health care, that restrict their ability to be equal participants in society. In this study, underlying contexts, assumptions, and ways of acting are investigated that perpetuate inequalities and pejorative treatment toward those with disabilities. Several nurse researchers and educators suggest specific content for, or approaches to, education about DD. Critical pedagogy that employs cultural competency and a disability studies' framework to guide curriculum and course development will allow assumptions underlying common health care practices that oppress and "other" people with disabilities to be exposed and changed.

Working with nurse educators' collective wisdom: implications for recruitment and retention.

Very few studies have been undertaken to consider the impact of nurse education environments on faculty retention and recruitment at a time when numbers of nursing faculty are falling to significantly low levels. The purpose of this article is to deconstruct nurse educators' experience, illuminate what nurse educators think is important to a quality work environment, and offer some critical questions that lead to the potential for change. The findings of this study suggest recruitment and retention of nurse educators are best addressed by a critical reexamination of organizations. Paying attention to what nurse educators believe is a quality work environment is a starting point for the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. This study contains compelling information that speaks to nurse educators' experience in what they believe is important in their workplace.

Quality workplace environments for nurse educators: implications for recruitment and retention.

Although information is available regarding quality practice environments for RNs, there is little knowledge about what constitutes quality practice environments for nurse educators teaching in schools of nursing. Not only is there a need to examine nurse educators' workplaces, but there is also a call for a close examination of the culture in schools of nursing. Cultural analyses will enable faculty to grapple with the policies and processes which need to be addressed. Besides these areas, nurse educators need to contribute to research on their own environments, paying attention to their everyday experiences and what is important to them in their workplaces. These areas will illuminate how best to support organization and institutional change to attract new nursing faculty and to retain those who desire to stay. Finally, organizations must be committed to working with faculty in areas nurse educators identify as important to them and to address those aspects of their work environments identified as causing concern.

Recruitment and retention of nurse educators: a pilot study of what nurse educators consider important in their workplaces.

To better understand the nature of a quality practice environment for nurse educators, a survey instrument was constructed and pilot tested. he aim of the study was to highlight some of the critical issues needing to be addressed to support the recruitment and retention of nurse educators. The knowledge generated from the survey makes explicit what nurse educators consider to be important to them in their environments and whether they are currently experiencing these elements. Based on the preliminary results, additional research needs to be undertaken to further develop the psychometric properties of the tool along with a closer examination of the culture of schools of nursing. The information generated may serve to enhance nurse educators' environments to better reflect what they consider to be important.

Creating a community of scholars: using a community development approach to foster scholarship with nursing faculty.

Many nurse educators in Canada have participated in a culture where their primary responsibility was to educate nurses and provide service to their communities. Over the last three decades, major rethinking of this focus has resulted in the expectation that nurse educators engage in scholarship. In this paper, we describe a community development project designed to foster nurse educators' scholarship. This approach was chosen not only to build scholarship capacity amongst nursing faculty, but also to effect a change in the culture of scholarship prevalent in many academic environments. Rather than focusing on individual scholarly endeavours, the project partners' vision is for a collaborative approach that creates a community of scholars working together.

'I await your apology': a polyphonic narrative interpretation.

A patient's experience unfolds through a nurse's personal conversation with herself. Conveyed through three voices, the nurse's dialogue highlights her many internal struggles; those with her conscience on what she understands to be best practice, those important to her as a person, those of an ethical nature that profoundly affect one's search for meaning, and those in the personal-professional realm driven in part by institutional culture. These multivoiced knowledges are confronted in ways that foreground language and understanding as performative acts. At the same time, another journey is co-constructed with the reader, one that weaves in-between the symbolic and the real, engaging the imaginary in (inter)play. The nurse's response to the inner conversation with her 'self/selves' problematizes practice, illuminates the patient's perspective while highlighting the nurse's sense of her marginal position. Insight into reified and hegemonic assumptions, strategies of how control is maintained through organizational surveillance, trust and moral agency help to foreground personal expectations as the nurse begins to grapple with her own feelings of betrayal. Tackling these insights offers opportunities to rethink oppressive practices in the provision of care. It also enables an alternative appreciation of the everyday dilemmas confronting nurses and offers new meaning to practice.