Teaching/Learning Philosophy
Teaching is a complex, interactive, and outcome-focused operation. Well applied evidence-based teaching strategies consider learning goals, student diversity (including learning styles), and faculty and student resources. Teaching strategies are matched to student learning styles, reflect ongoing formative and summative assessment, and are driven by the ideal of continuous improvement. The instructor focuses on learners and provides environments that facilitate student learning where desired learner outcomes (cognitive, affective, psychomotor) are achieved.
Liberal learning that prepares students to live responsible, productive, and creative lives is the foundation of professional nursing education. Liberal education requires respect for truth, recognition of the importance of context (e.g., historical, cultural), and an examination of connections among formal learning, citizenship, and community service.
Integration of liberal education and nursing education comes from faculty members guiding students to build bridges between key concepts in both. Students must achieve competency with critical thinking, communication, ethical decision-making, evidence-based practice, and information literacy. Information literacy enables students to recognize when information is needed and locate, appraise and effectively incorporate salient information.
Ideally, nursing education takes place in an environment that promotes true transdisciplinary experiences where individuals from each discipline show mutual understanding and respect towards and for the other’s discipline and contribution.
Philosophy
The School of Nursing faculty support the goals and mission of the College of Health and Human Development and the University, which include teaching, scholarship, and service to the University and community. The philosophy of the School expresses beliefs about human beings, health, the environment, and nursing.
Human beings are multi-dimensional, dynamic, open systems in continual interaction with the environment. They are complex wholes who seek balance through their unique abilities. They exhibit age, cultural, spiritual, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation diversity. Accountable for their actions, human beings have the potential for self-direction and rational decision making as they maintain, preserve, and promote health throughout the lifespan.
Health is a dynamic process—a way of life—that involves complex responses between internal and external factors. It is the integration of the multiple dimensions of life, which when working in harmony create wholeness and lead to a sense of well-being and satisfaction. Health is influenced by individual genetic endowments, levels of development, lifestyles, and sociocultural and physical environments, and is manifested as a pattern. Health can also refer to the needs of a larger community or society.
The environment is composed of internal and external components. The internal environment includes physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual realities within human beings. The external environment includes social organizations and systems, such as economics, politics, and policy development, as well as the physical environment. Environment is also the aggregate of societal expectations, reflected in the intracultural and intercultural interaction of human beings within families, groups, and communities.
Nursing is a unique, practice-oriented discipline that meets a societal goal. The science of nursing is concerned with critical thinking, problem solving, and the application of knowledge. The art of nursing involves interacting, caring, and valuing. The goals of nursing contribute to health enhancement via health promotion, risk reduction, and disease prevention. The ultimate goal of nursing is to optimize health by interpreting and influencing responses to health and illness. Attainment of optimal health requires collaboration between nurse and client as well as with professionals from other disciplines. Professional nursing involves provision of compassionate patient-centered care –using the nursing process, employing evidence-based practice, applying quality improvement, working in inter and interdisciplinary teams, and using informatics.
The nursing process is a dynamic and on-going means of addressing clinical problems. A collaborative endeavor, it depends on nurse and client observations, perceptions, and consensual validations of physiological, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual needs. This process requires nurse, client, family, and members of collaborating health care teams to work together.
The nursing process involves:
1.Assessing factors that influence the position of the client, group, community, or population on a health-illness continuum;
2.Determining actual or potential health problem(s);
3.Establishing mutually acceptable goals;
4.Intervening by promoting adaptation through modification of influencing factors or increasing the coping response;
5.Evaluating the position on the health-illness continuum to reaffirm or modify nursing interventions.
