Breathing Life into the Syllabus: The Collaborative Development of a First-Year Writing Course for Nursing Students

In this essay, we tell the story of how a team of English and nursing professors came together to develop curriculum for a mandatory first-semester writing course in the collaborative Bachelor of Science, Nursing (BScN) at Fanshawe College and Western University, both in London, Ontario. The discussion focuses on the implementation of the course at the Fanshawe site. Following a review of literature that has informed our thinking about writing in nursing, we discuss how the team, consisting of both English/writing and nursing faculty, solved curriculum problems to develop an effective course. We also look forward to areas for future development. *** In this essay, we tell the story of how a team of English and nursing professors came together to develop curriculum for a mandatory first-semester writing course in the collaborative Bachelor of Science, Nursing (BScN) at Fanshawe College (hereafter Fanshawe) and Western University (hereafter Western). The need to build this course resulted in ongoing discussions among educators of very different disciplinary backgrounds about topics ranging from the basic mission of the course to the development of discipline-relevant assignments. Our reflections on this process will likely interest educators interested in developing a similar course; however, these reflections also raise larger questions regarding students’ needs, interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, and curriculum development processes