By Marcia Hills, RN, BScN, MA, PhD
As the University of Victoria School of Nursing celebrates its 40 year anniversary, it is timely to step back and reflect upon our school’s formative development years.
In 1989, the synchronicity of three events lead to the creation of the innovative and transformative Collaborative Nursing Program of British Columbia (CNPBC). A “Curriculum Revolution” (1989) was occurring mostly in the USA. Nurse educator leaders were attempting to overcome two challenges: Nursing’s tormented ambivalent relationship with medicine; and Nursing’s 40 year endorsement of a Tylerian behavioral model of education (1949). Secondly, Health Promotion was on the Canadian government policy agenda and the CNPBC Steering Committee saw the opportunity to connect health promotion and nursing. And thirdly and coincidentally, an initiative was underway in British Columbia to create better access to post-secondary education by having universities mentor several community colleges to become degree granting.
Although the provincial government’s intention was to create better access to higher education, the CNPBC Steering Committee seized the opportunity to create a shared vision of a generic 4 year baccalaureate program that would have the same curriculum delivered on four campuses geographically distributed throughout the province with Camosun College and the University of Victoria establishing a permanent collaboration.
The curriculum created by the 13 person CNPBC Curriculum Committee included the following innovations: truly embracing nursing knowledge rather than medical knowledge as a base from which to practice; recognizing Nursing’s domain of practice as being different but complementary to Medicine’s with a focus on caring rather than curing; developing a science of people that focuses on their experiences of health and healing; recognizing human and relational aspects of self and Nursing as being primary with skills being secondary; and, understanding caring as the theoretical, ethical and philosophical foundation of nursing.
In addition, following the redefining of curriculum as, “those transactions and interactions that take place between teachers and students and students and students, with the intent that learning take place” (Bevis & Watson, 1989, p.72), the CNPBC embraced an emancipatory relational pedagogy that viewed teachers and students as being in a mutual inquiry process of learning.
Similarly, the Committee looked to Freire’s teachings that combining a relational caring perspective with an emancipatory one aligns the teacher and the student and together they engage with information to be learned (Freire 1972; Hills & Watson, 2011). This is very different than the Tylerian behaviourist “banking” concept in which the teacher is seen as the transmitter of information and the student is perceived as the passive recipient of information which is to be regurgitated on the teacher’s demand. With that perspective, the committee members agreed that if we wanted “to graduate nurses who embrace caring as their moral compass that guides all their actions and who are independent thinkers with confidence in their ability to make clinical judgments, we must educate them within a truly emancipatory relational pedagogy” (Hills & Watson, 2011, p. 55).
This curriculum became an inspiration for many other nursing programs in Canada and the United States with many adopting or adapting it for their own purposes. Since its inception, our curriculum has undergone many iterations and developments including adding and changing partners, making curriculum changes, and having faculty leave or join the program. Nevertheless, it remains germane in this 21st century.
From the 2016 Fall Communiqué — 40th Anniversary Issue
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