Reflections on Australia teaching exchange experience in 2009
By Betty Davies
In February 2009, School of Nursing, Senior Instructor, Jeannine Moreau, embarked on a 5-month faculty teaching exchange at Deakin University’s Faculty of Health, Medicine, Nursing and Behavioural Sciences in Geelong, Australia. Upon her arrival, Jeannine, whose research interests include gerontology, women’s health, critical discourse analysis, postmodern and social/feminist critical theories, and nursing education, met with the challenges of teaching at a school where the nursing curriculum is content-based. This approach is in substantial contrast to UVic’s concept-based nursing curriculum. This difference caused Jeannine to critically examine and re-evaluate the elements of the UVic program including her teaching/learning practices.
Now, over a year later, Jeannine reflects on her time at Deakin and discusses how her experiences are influencing her way of taking up the curriculum, her philosophy of teaching/learning and practices in working with UVic students:
As a Canadian nurse educator teaching a semester in an Australian baccalaureate nursing program I experienced sharply familiar yet uncannily different ways of ‘doing’ education and ‘being’ a teacher. My sense of knowing was challenged. It was a ‘strange’ experience, unfamiliar, striking, and curious being
immersed in a mix of multi-dimensional intersecting cultures colored by my own lens of Canadian cultures. I came from teaching many years within a concept-based BSN curriculum, a culture of philosophically and experientially driven ways of taking up notions that informed practices of nursing. Now I had
parachuted into a culture of pragmatics driven by a need to gain certain kinds of knowledge and skill to take up particular functions of nursing.
Function implies doing, defined ends, purpose and clarity of role, achievement and meaning that usually belies compounding effects of intersecting complexities and diversities of nursing practice. An approach to nursing education I found to have certain merit in providing some certainty in the chaos of ever changing health care settings. And yet, I wondered how prepared were these students to be more than efficient care providers? How prepared were they to influence changes in nursing practice as necessitated by challenges of an increasingly globalized world of health care?
In trying to learn what can be gained from the pragmatic nature of one program to inform the perhaps less defined, albeit more critically achieved outcomes of the other, I find using the notion of ‘strange’ enormously helpful. Taking up my experiences as unfamiliar and curious precipitated important critical questions and informed my current teaching. How is it that at the end of each program there was a range of ‘new’ nurses from task focused through to critically reflective ready for leadership? Albeit, I think the proportion of ‘kinds’ is different one program to the next.
The idea of ‘strange’ stimulated my appreciation for the complexities, multi-dimensionality and gamut of differences that sharpened my sense of how education is, can be, should be or might be for both teachers and students. It precipitated questions about similar embedded tensions in both countries that seemed to play out differently: e.g., the struggle to meet immediate needs in health care, i.e., ‘job readiness’ in tension with graduates to be ‘practice ready’ and the tensions of meeting demands to ‘fill a nursing shortage’ with maintaining quality education.
In the immediate, I am more vigilant about the quality of student engagement as that seems the strongest determining factor of the quality of education and desired student outcomes.
I now approach teaching more pragmatically, clearly student-centered and affirming of a belief in valuing diversity: i.e., ‘hearing’ where students indicate they sit in the spectrum from task-oriented to concept-driven approaches to being a nurse and doing nursing. I strive to more deliberately hone their self-described ways of knowing how to nurse while encouraging cultivation of curiosity and capacity for alternate ways of being a nurse.
I think I have gained capacity to help students become, shall I say more ‘well rounded’ as care providers, efficient practitioners and yet ready to recognize and take up leadership initiative in the everyday of nursing practice to perhaps, at some time, global challenges.
From 2010 Fall Communiqué
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