A rift in nursing education and practice on a landscape of curriculum and health-care reform, diploma nurse educators' professional identities in question

grantor: University of TorontoThe purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of diploma nurse educators' professional identities and knowledge formation as they live the health-care and nursing education reform. A need to examine the impact of these changes on their professional lives stems from a recognition of their role confusion and conflicting identities. My approach to the study was narrative and interpretative in nature. Drawing on nursing and educational literature, I contextualize the present nursing education revolution in meeting the challenges of health care, within the seemingly divergent professional ideologies in nursing. This disparity has its roots in nursing's historical pursuit of professionalization. Through collaboration with my participants for over two years, I examine dilemmas that surfaced as we lived and told our professional stories using Connelly and Clandinin's narrative inquiry, metaphors of landscape, identity, conduit, competing and conflicting plotlines, and Dewey's experiential theory. Our field texts consist of stories of teaching, conversations, participant observations, and my journal writing. Documents from professional and regulatory nursing organizations, media accounts, interview transcripts of nursing leaders and college reports were used to enrich both our stories and the analysis. My initial view on professional identity emphasized the theoretical knowledge from external authority, which is part of the professional socialization. Through this inquiry, my participants and I came to understand our identities and knowledge development through our practice. Our stories do not only allow us to voice our dilemmas but also enable an understanding of the power of retelling and reliving our stories. Using Taoism and the concept of dialectic, we recognize the inevitable interplay between a theory-driven, expert practice and a humanistic, holistic, participative approach. While there are questions for future inquiry, one point is clear that it is the tension which holds the growth of professional nursing as we continue to live simultaneously the biomedical and human science paradigms. Through a feminist process of relational knowing, I imagine a possibility to create space for nurses/diploma nurse educators, nurse theorists/researchers and administrators to listen and understand each other as nursing vacillates between the narrative co-existence of certainty and uncertainty.Ph.D