Building scholarship capacity and transforming nurse educators' practice through institutional ethnography.

Institutional ethnography can be viewed as a method of inquiry for nurse educators to build scholarship capacity and advance the quality of nursing practice. Within a framework of the Boyer (1990) model and the domains of academic scholarship in nursing described by the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (2006), we discuss how a team of nurse educators participated as co-researchers in an institutional ethnographic study to examine the routine work of evaluating nursing students and discovered a contradiction between what was actually happening and what we value as nurse educators. The discovery, teaching, application, and integration dimensions of scholarship are examined for links to our emerging insights from the research and ramifications for our teaching practices.

Contesting our taken-for-granted understanding of student evaluation: insights from a team of institutional ethnographers.

Educating for nursing excellence can be demanding and challenging work. One of the troubling centers of attention for nurse educators is their evaluation of nursing students in practice. This article outlines some of the problems nurse educators encounter in evaluation work and uses the theoretical framework of institutional ethnography to disrupt some of the conventional explanations that mediate what happens in teaching and evaluation work when students fail to meet the required standards.