Foundations for Nursing Education: Nursing as Discipline and Characteristics

Fundamentals of nursing education introduces nursing students to the thorough assessment of patients, the nursing process, communication between nurse, healthcare providers and patient, cultural differences, functional health patterns, and the overall framework of nursing practice. Foundations for Nursing Education represent Nursing as Discipline and Characteristics that are unique in nature.

Foundations for Nursing Education

The focus of this topic is to discuss nursing education in relation to the discipline of nursing and to understand the how and why of the evolution of nursing education in the manner that we know it today. Teaching methods for nursing education do not exist in a vacuum. It is important that future, novice, and seasoned nursing educators make a clear connection between the nature of nursing as a discipline and the ways of teaching selected and invented for nursing education.

In teaching nursing, faculty never teach a “piece” of value or information in isolation when teaching that “piece,” we are always teaching it as a meaningful aspect of the discipline, and thus we are teaching the discipline. The basic premise of this topic is that teaching methods must be tailored to the nature of nursing as a discipline. Part of the decision-making about selection of teaching methods involves an understanding of the content of nursing knowledge, the structure of that content, and the values and beliefs that underlie the nature of the discipline.

In this topic, we intend to prepare the reader to think broadly, critically, and specifically about the possible use of the methods described in this book. We take the view that methods don’t work except when people can work them effectively. Part of effectively choosing, modifying, and inventing methods for nursing education involves a deep and clear understanding of nursing as a discipline, and an equally clear and deep understanding of nursing education as the vehicle for facilitating knowledge and understanding of the discipline.

With an appropriate knowledge and understanding of the discipline, nurses can design effective nursing care and thus actualize the highest purpose of the discipline of nursing. The topic focuses on the broad context of nursing as a discipline of knowledge. Included in the discussion will be philosophical foundations and practical implications for choosing/inventing teaching methods that work for nursing education.

Philosophical and theoretical foundations offer coherent and enduring values to guide choice of method. Practical implications provide the link between nursing as a discipline and nursing as a profession. Classic scholars have expressed this link in terms like “practical discipline( Dickoff , James, & Wiedenbach , 1968) and “learned profession” (Rogers, 1970).

Nursing as a Discipline

It is important for the nursing educator to conceptualize nursing as a discipline. First we will examine the idea of disciplines, as articulated initially by King and Brownell (1976). We will then discuss nursing as a learned profession, a discipline that has a direct and immediate practice imperative, and relate that idea to nursing education. It is necessary to examine the issue of what is to be taught, as a precursor to questions of how to teach and how to facilitate learning.

Characteristics of a Discipline

Characteristics of Disciplines Classic education theorists, King and Brownell (1976), developed a descriptive set of characteristics of disciplines as a foundation for their treatment of curriculum issues. These characteristics were intended to be generic descriptors of all disciplines:

  • Community of scholars
  • Focused on a unique social need
  • Specialized network
  • Specific knowledge and skills
  • Contains a value system
  • Has an established instructive community

The key to the nature and uniqueness of any discipline is the unique focus and perspective it takes on human concerns. Each discipline illuminates an aspect of what it means to be human and to live in the world. A description of these characteristics and the importance of each to nursing is found in Parker (2006). The most fundamental of those characteristics is that a discipline addresses an explicit unique social need.

This tells us that each discipline offers a unique way of viewing human concerns and, in fact, each discipline is unique. King and Brownell (1976) described disciplines as communities of scholars voluntarily working together around a focused and unique social need or concern. A discipline imaginatively creates and uses specialized networks, methods, and materials designed to produce and employ specific knowledge and skills in response to that focused and unique concern.

A discipline has a value system and is organized as an instructive community. Each discipline illuminates an aspect of what it means to be human and to live in the world. New disciplines emerge in two ways. One way for a discipline to develop is when a more focused perspective is taken by a critical mass of members of an existing discipline a new discipline can emerge, such as the practice discipline of physical therapy.

This discipline emerged as knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and physics were used in developed scholarship and practice focused on prevention and healing of physical health disorders. Such a new discipline would be created from a body of research, scholarship, and theories as well as from new or unique contributions to society that have been distinguished from those related to existing disciplines.

The second manner in which a discipline develops is from the intersecting margins of two or more disciplines. In this manner, a new discipline may emerge whose focus is constructed from specialized aspects of several parent disciplines. A discipline such as biochemistry is an example of a new discipline derived from the expanse of biology and chemistry.

These same processes can produce sub disciplines and specializations within a discipline, that is, minor, specialized focal interests that retain a clear link to the focus of the broader discipline, such as physical therapy being practiced in different settings to include acute care, rehabilitation, and athletics.

These processes of discipline development have contributed to the expansion of the formal knowledge and practice of nursing, and concomitantly added clarity to the central focus of the discipline and service of nursing. These processes have also led to specialization within the discipline of nursing practice.

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https://nurseseducator.com/nursing-as-a-practiced-discipline-a-learned-profession-focuses-and-grand-nursing-theory/

https://nurseseducator.com/foundations-of-curriculum-design-for-nursing-and-history-of-nursing-education-in-philosophical-view/

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