Pamela M. Ironside, PhD, RN

The challenges facing contemporary nursing faculty including increasing diversity in student populations, diminishing resources, and faculty reductions have prompted calls for educational reform through developing new pedagogies. These calls have resulted in a renewed commitment to innovative teaching and learning strategies and serious scholarship has been devoted to exploring alternatives to outcomes education. The literature is replete with descriptions of alternative pedagogical approaches to schooling (critical, feminist, and phenomenological) that are claimed to be responsive to the contemporary challenges in nursing and higher education. Yet, there are very few studies in either higher or nursing education that evaluate a) the reforming and innovating practices of nursing faculties, or b) how such reform influences (or fails to influence) student’s experiences in classroom and clinical situations or their perceptions of the learning climate or teaching effectiveness. To develop the science of nursing education, multi-method, multi-site studies are needed to systematically evaluate reforming practices and the use of new pedagogies in the context of contemporary nursing education. The purpose of this pilot study is to document how nursing faculty enact reform and innovation in contemporary classroom and clinical situations, how students experience such reform and how reform efforts influence (or fail to influence) student’s perceptions of teaching effectiveness and the learning climate within nursing courses. This study reflects the NLN’s Priorities for Research in Nursing Education, specifically research-based paradigms, strategies and evaluation models in nursing education and educator competencies for changing social, healthcare, and educational worlds and will contribute to developing the science of nursing education by providing evidence upon which teachers can draw to enact educational reform.