NUR 7000 Module 1 Philosophy Paper: A New BSN Program's Philosophy Built on a Century of Nursing Education Reports Example

A Century of Reports in Five Sentences: Writing the Philosophy for a New BSN Program in Union County

Student Name

M.S. in Nursing, Nurse Educator, Thomas Edison State University

NUR-7000: Curriculum Theory and Development in Nursing Education

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

A Century of Reports in Five Sentences: Writing the Philosophy for a New BSN Program in Union County

The Task

The university and its faculty in this paper are invented. A comprehensive university in Union County has approval to open a baccalaureate nursing program in two years. The founding director asked a faculty member, an MSN student in nursing education, to draft the program's philosophy for the curriculum committee. Drafts circulated by other schools tended to read alike: caring, holistic, lifelong learning, excellence. The faculty member argued that a philosophy should say what the program believes about nursing, learning and the student, and that those beliefs should be grounded in what nursing education has learned about itself.

What Goldmark Found

A national committee, whose 1923 report is known by its secretary's name (Goldmark, 1923), examined nursing schools across the United States. It found that most nurses were trained in hospital schools whose first purpose was staffing the hospital, so that students worked long hours on wards with little instruction and education was subordinated to service. Classroom teaching was often brief and given by busy staff. The committee recommended that schools be organized for education rather than service, with separate funding, trained instructors and a clear curriculum, and it urged university schools of nursing to prepare leaders.

Brown's Call

Writing just after the Second World War, Brown (1948) studied what nursing would need in the decades ahead. She argued that professional nursing education belonged in colleges and universities, that the profession needed a smaller group of professionally educated nurses supported by practical nurses and aides and that schools should be accredited on educational standards. Her report helped move nursing education toward higher education and toward public accreditation of programs.

Between the Reports

The decades between Goldmark and the Carnegie study saw the changes the earlier reports urged come slowly and unevenly. Hospital diploma schools remained the main route into nursing well into the second half of the twentieth century. Associate degree programs in community colleges grew rapidly from the 1950s, offering a shorter route to licensure, and baccalaureate programs expanded more gradually. The result was a profession entered through three kinds of programs, a pattern that continues today and that every new program must position itself within. The Union County program enters this mix of routes as a baccalaureate program in a university, which is the setting Brown argued for, but it will still depend on hospitals for clinical learning, which is where Goldmark's warnings about service and education apply.

What the Carnegie Study Asked Next

Benner et al. (2010) reported a national study of nursing education sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. They found strong clinical teaching in many programs but classroom teaching that covered large amounts of decontextualized content. They called for teaching that develops a sense of salience in particular clinical situations, for integrating classroom and clinical teaching, for an emphasis on clinical reasoning alongside critical thinking and for attention to students' formation as professionals.

The Philosophy

The draft has five sentences, each answering a lesson from the reports.

Nursing is a scholarly discipline and a practice, in which knowledge from the sciences and humanities is used with judgment to help people and communities protect and restore health. Students are learners wherever they are placed, and clinical time is designed for their learning, not to fill gaps in staffing. Learning happens best in particular situations, where students meet real and simulated patients and connect what they know to what they see. Faculty teach clinical reasoning and the ethical comportment of a nurse, helping students form an identity as professionals who are accountable to patients and the public. The program serves the communities of Union County, and its graduates are prepared to care for people across differences of language, income and culture.

Testing the Philosophy

The faculty member tested each sentence against a practical question: what would the program do differently if it believed this? The second sentence, for example, means that clinical agreements will state that students are not counted in staffing, and that faculty will limit students' assignments to what supports their objectives. The third sentence means that classroom courses will be built around patient situations and linked to concurrent clinical experiences. The fifth means that the program will place students in community settings that serve Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking families, two large groups in the county. A sentence that changed nothing would have been cut.

How the Committee Responded

The curriculum committee discussed the draft over two meetings. Clinical faculty welcomed the second sentence but asked how it would be enforced when partner hospitals were short-staffed, and the committee agreed to write it into every clinical agreement. One member argued that the philosophy should name caring explicitly; the drafter showed that the fourth sentence's reference to ethical comportment carried that idea in terms the program could teach and assess, and the member agreed. A community member on the advisory board asked that the fifth sentence mention partnership with community organizations, which was added. The changes made the philosophy the committee's own rather than one person's draft.

The Educator's Role

Curriculum work places the nurse educator between practice, research and the curriculum. The philosophy commits faculty to bringing practice partners into curriculum decisions and to reviewing new research on teaching, so that the program does not repeat the patterns the reports criticized.

Limits

Historical reports reflect their own time; some of Goldmark's assumptions about who would become nurses would not be accepted today. A philosophy is only as strong as the faculty's willingness to act on it. The draft will change after the committee's review.

Conclusion

A century of reports showed nursing education struggling with service before education, the place of nursing in higher education and the gap between classroom and practice. The draft philosophy answers each in a sentence that the program can act on. Grounding a philosophy in history keeps it from sounding like every other school's and gives the curriculum committee a basis for decisions.

References

Benner, P., Sutphen, M., Leonard, V., & Day, L. (2010). Educating nurses: A call for radical transformation. Jossey-Bass.

Brown, E. L. (1948). Nursing for the future. Russell Sage Foundation.

Goldmark, J. (1923). Nursing and nursing education in the United States. Macmillan.