Welcome to Nursing EDge Unscripted 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 have 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. In February, we highlighted the contributions of Dr. Em Bevis, who played a significant role in the National League for Nursing's educational reform effort. Referred
to as the Curriculum Revolution. Rejecting the long-standing, content-laden, behaviorist model of nursing education, these revolutionaries called for a "caring" curriculum, creating new pedagogies suited for a practice discipline and preparing students who could participate as leaders in health care reform, with values that recognize the growing diversity of both individual and family lifestyles in our society.
Dr. Nancy Diekelmann, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Diekelmann was joined by her colleague, Dr. Pamela Ironside, who studied with Dr. Diekelmann at Wisconsin and later became director of the Center for Research and Nursing Education at Indiana University. Together they advocated for curricular innovation and a significant paradigm shift in nursing education.
Dr. Diekelmann is best known for the development and dissemination of Narrative Pedagogy, the first nursing pedagogy from nursing research for nursing education. Through her work, Dr. Diekelmann identified common practices that became evident in the teaching and learning experiences of students,
teachers, and clinicians. Called the Concernful Practices of Schooling Learning Teaching, these practices provided a new language for interpreting, reflecting on, and understanding the experiences of students, teachers, and clinicians. At the NLN Annual Convention in 2003, Dr. Diekelmann and Dr. Ironside presented a dialogue explaining
their role in curriculum revolution. Dr. Ironside introduced the session describing her feelings in the late 1980s about the landscape of nursing education; she lamented the unrest she experienced using conventional pedagogy with its allegiance to content and teacher-directed learning , to guide her teaching. These methods limited her ability to be innovative and fully engage
with students in the practice of nursing. About that time, Dr. Frank Schaffer from the NLN called her with the request to join him in planning a conference about curriculum innovation. She replied, "Sorry Frank. Nothing short of a revolution is going to get me to another conference." And Dr. Schaefer responded, "That's it; we'll call it the curriculum revolution." And so they joined the revolution
and the rest is history. From 1989 to 1994, the NLN held four national conferences that led to the publication of journal articles and a series of books to highlight substantive alternatives to conventional pedagogy and promote and support
reform in nursing education. In Dr. Diekelmann's words: She recognized that the changes in clinical practice and the demands to provide curricula that foster thinking were in direct contrast to the then-current trend in nursing education to add more content to the curriculum to 'stay current.' She spoke eloquently about the additive curriculum stating that, "as nursing faculty work to incorporate the explosion of biomedical knowledge
into nursing curricula, the additive curriculum is worse than ever." By sparking a revolution to advocate for a whole new generation of teachers to envision a new nursing education and challenge traditional approaches, Dr. Diekelmann and Dr. Ironside collaborated to create alternatives to conventional pedagogy and to the additive
curriculum. They called for teaching and learning to be viewed as practices that are situated within a particular context, so that, in partnership with students, the act of teaching and learning is always becoming. They spoke eloquently about the power of the curriculum revolution to prepare the way for a new way of teaching and learning.
In part two of this series, we will discuss how they researched Narrative Pedagogy and explored ways for students to develop meaning for their practice out of the experiences provided by teachers. 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