Welcome to Nursing EDge Inscripted Saga where we use stories to connect the past to the present and then our future as we reimagine our teaching and learning. As we celebrate the NLN Year of the Nurse Educator, we pay tribute to extraordinary nurses who've made significant contributions to nursing education. We dive into the stories of nurse educators who recognized a need, challenged traditional customs, and influenced transformative
change. Over the past six months, we focused on the contributions of educators and thoughtful innovators and scholars who played a significant role in the National League for Nursing's curriculum revolution during the 1980s and 90s.
As a dynamic cohort of educators focused on revisioning nursing education, they opened the door to new ways to think about curriculum, dialogue, clinical judgment, and the power dynamics inherent in the teacher-student relationship, along with the theoretical underpinnings of clinical practice. This month we celebrate another scholar, Dr. David Allen, who joined the revolution at the first
national conference in 1986. Dr. Allen recently retired director of the nursing and health studies program at the University of Washington Bothell and former chair of women's studies at UW, is a renowned scholar in critical social theory, social justice, and feminist pedagogy. Dr. Allen came to nursing after completing a master's degree in fine arts and a PhD in philosophy and theater arts at the University of Iowa. He was drawn to nursing to its fundamental relationship
to health and social justice. He entered nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he completed both a baccalaureate and master's degree in nursing, joined the faculty, and in the process embraced the transformative thinking of Dr. Nancy Diekelmann, a professor in the school of nursing and a leading member of the
revolution. Viewing the nursing education enterprise from the lens of his foundational knowledge in philosophy, critical social theory, and gender power relationships, he wholeheartedly embraced the call for a radical transformation
Critical social theory, as described by Dr. Allen in his presentation at the first NLN curriculum revolution conference, is a theory of social rationality of how communities make rational decisions. It is a theory about what principles underlie our collective decision-making, about what principles should be in operation if decisions are to be rational.
He applied critical theory to nursing education by exploring how it changes the way educators view students and how decisions are made by nurse educators about content and how to organize learning. He was fond of quoting Dr. Diekelmann who often said that nursing education is analogous to, "dropping students into the middle of a lake and telling them to swim to all shores at the same time." For example, he voiced his
concern about content overload. He described his disdain when walking by a lecture hall and seeing, "a sea of passive, bored faces writing down information. It makes me sad and angry to witness the harnessing of all that student intelligence, creativity, and energy to the yoke of memorizing massive amounts of information." Additionally, he postulated that nursing education equated increased time and content with
difficulty, not with increased complexity. He explained that as a nursing student himself and as he progressed in the program, we memorized more information, saw more patients, and read more textbooks, but the level of thinking
of analysis of understanding was nominal. Dr. Allen's previous experiences in being a student of and a teacher of philosophy and critical theory shaped his understanding that engaged learning, viewing students as partners in the educational community, embracing dialogue and diversity of perspectives with students and colleagues, and thinking differently about how we organize our schools of nursing, and it guided him to ask: In part two of this series
we will explore how Dr. Allen identified ways to engage more fully and partner more intentionally with students and colleagues in dialogue to revision the nursing educational experience. And so the Saga continues and may our saga continue as we bring to a close this episode of Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga. Thank you for joining us