Teaching nursing's history : a national survey of Australian Schools of Nursing, 2007-2008

This paper reports on an Australian survey of all Schools of Nursing in Universities that took place over an 8 month period between 2007 and 2008. Approaches to teaching the history of nursing have not been researched in Australia and thus this study was implemented in order to begin a program of inquiry aiming to understand and extend effective teaching of history approaches. The study used telephone semi-structured interviews with academics nominated by their Head of School. It found that participants value history of nursing teaching, but the crowded curriculum is effectively erasing history’s place and potential and revealed ideological tensions shaping and constraining history of nursing teaching. In Australia, nursing’s history is taught in a variety of ways. However, these various teaching strategies and resources utilized are not evenly available and pedagogical innovations are not shared across Australian Schools of Nursing. Two major recommendations for Schools of Nursing are: 1) The nursing curriculum needs to be developed from a set of principles and standards that define the attributes of the professional nurse, not from a process of reacting to interest groups resulting in a crowded curriculum and 2) History of nursing pedagogy needs to be systematically developed and disseminated through a national virtual centre to enhance academic teachers’ understanding of the discipline area and to support their teaching practice.