They took the time ... they started to care: stories of African-American nursing students in intercultural caring groups.

Socially responsible nurse educators articulate the need to explore opportunities for nursing students to participate in experiences that promote caring and respect for diversity. This research illuminates the experiences of 10 African-American nursing students who participated in caring groups while enrolled in a predominantly White nursing education program. Although the meanings embedded in the African-American students' stories revealed commonalities with those of European-American and international students, there were also some differences. The authors maintained a critical social consciousness to analyze and describe these commonalities and differences. This article discusses the constitutive patterns and themes that emerged from the data and addresses implications for nursing education and practice.

Caring interactions among nursing students: a descriptive comparison of 2 associate degree nursing programs.

Increasing emphasis has been given to the importance of caring as a curricular theme in nursing education and the value of developing students who will be able to function in a practice role as a caring nurse. The challenge for nurse educators is to understand and facilitate those processes through which students can be socialized to caring as a professional value in nursing. The findings from research that was conducted to investigate caring in nursing education suggest that caring can emerge during students' interactions with other students and during their interactions with faculty members. Therefore, it may be useful to capitalize on peer relationships as a strategy through which students can experience caring behaviors and develop skill in the practice of caring for others. The findings from this study support the need to investigate experiential learning strategies that are designed to promote the practice of caring among the student peer group. Additional research is needed to validate the effectiveness of such strategies as a method through which nursing students can learn caring.

Clinical learning experiences and professional nurse caring: a critical phenomenological study of female baccalaureate nursing students.

The purpose of this critical phenomenological study was to discover, describe, and analyze how nursing students learn professional nurse caring in the clinical context of nursing education. In this article, I report on interviews from 18 female baccalaureate nursing students, 17 of whom are European American and one of whom is African American. Participants in this study narrated their stories about learning caring by first describing their understanding of how they created caring with patients. After uncovering the layers of their patient care interactions, they were then able to answer the research question of how they learned caring in clinical. Because participants' interactions with patients were the context for the development of their understanding of caring, I identify the relational theme of caring and interacting with patients as the central focal point for narrating stories about caring. From the data analysis, I report two constitutive patterns: the first, creative caring, contains seven themes, and the second, learning caring, contains five themes. Findings from this research are summarized as "embodied caring knowledge." This research has implications for nursing faculty, students, and practitioners who are interested in enhancing their understanding of living and learning caring within nursing.

Doctoral preparation of nursing faculty.

Is the doctorate necessary for all nurse educators? Should nurse educators hold a doctorate or is a non-nursing doctorate acceptable? The authors report on a survey which looked at information concerning the number of doctorally prepared nursing faculty and the institutional requirement of a doctorate as the terminal degree in nursing.