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.

Policy analysis and advocacy in nursing education: the Nursing Education Council of British Columbia framework.

Academic nursing leaders play a crucial role in the policy context for nursing education. Effectiveness in this role requires that they work together in presenting nursing education issues from a position of strength, informed by a critical analysis of policy pertaining to the delivery of quality nursing education and scholarship. We describe a collective process of dialog and critical analysis whereby nurse leaders in one Canadian province addressed pressing policy issues facing governments, nursing programs, faculty, and students. Consensus among academic nurse leaders, formalized through the development of a policy action framework, has enabled us to take a stand, at times highly contested, in the politicized arena of the nursing shortage. We present the components of a policy action framework for nursing education and share examples of how we have used a critical approach to analyze and frame policy issues in nursing education for inclusion on policy agendas. We believe our work has influenced provincial and national thinking about policy in nursing education is the foundation of our conclusion that political presence and shared strategy among academic nursing leaders is undeniably critical in the global context of nursing today.

Contesting our taken-for-granted understanding of student evaluation: insights from a team of institutional ethnographers.

Educating for nursing excellence can be demanding and challenging work. One of the troubling centers of attention for nurse educators is their evaluation of nursing students in practice. This article outlines some of the problems nurse educators encounter in evaluation work and uses the theoretical framework of institutional ethnography to disrupt some of the conventional explanations that mediate what happens in teaching and evaluation work when students fail to meet the required standards. In developing our analysis, we describe our research process and provide details about how we used some of the methodological conventions of institutional ethnography. The early findings from this project provide an alternate knowledge of our evaluation practices, which demands that we question our taken-for-granted understanding of due process and what it is accomplishing. Our findings raise compelling ethical questions that guide nurse educators to rethink our evaluation work.

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.

Emancipatory teaching-learning philosophy and practice education in acute care: navigating tensions.

Much has been written in the nursing literature about the intentions and desires of a transformatory movement in nursing education. However, dialogue and critique related to actual implementation of a curriculum revolution begun in the late 1980s are lacking. The acute care context of nursing practice holds particular challenges for faculty teaching in an emancipatory curriculum. How do faculty implement a philosophy of teaching-learning congruent with the curriculum revolution, in the context of an acute care setting that privileges empirical knowledge and values a behaviorist paradigm? In this article, we provide an example of one teaching approach grounded in an emancipatory ideology: critical questioning. We also discuss some of the tensions we associate with teaching-learning in an acute care context and our experiences of navigating these tensions.

Data collection strategies for accessing adolescent women's worlds.

A two-year study was initiated in 1999 to investigate adolescent women's health concerns pertaining to their relationships. Data were obtained from four groups of girls (ages 14-19; N = 31) that met for approximately 18 weeks each. To help equalize power in the groups and facilitate a respectful and caring environment, we encouraged each group to use a variety of strategies, including those based on feminist principles. Data collection procedures based on feminist values can enable researchers to gain rich descriptions on the lived experience of adolescent women. Such procedures can help create an environment in which individuals can articulate their concerns and collectively co-construct the meanings of life events in health-promoting and consciousness-raising ways.