A critical analysis of online nursing education: balancing optimistic and cautionary perspectives.

The landscape of nursing education has been transformed by increasing student demand for online programs coupled with strong institutional directives to deliver nursing courses through distributed learning. The authors present a qualitative research design informed by philosophical hermeneutics in which 30 undergraduate and graduate nursing students discuss their experiences of the influence of peer dynamics on online learning. The findings include issues related to time, demands of online participation, experiences of conflict, and the development of skills in the online environment.

Contemplating the fit and utility of nursing theory and nursing scholarship informed by the social sciences and humanities.

In this article, authors contend that a lack of familiarity with philosophical thinking undermines the ability of students and subsequently practicing nurses to theorize for themselves. Engagement with philosophical ideas propels nurses well beyond the unthinking "application" of extant theory, to theorizing, that is, using theoretical formulations to engage with the significant phenomena we encounter in the world of human health. The authors present a framework to guide philosophical interrogation of knowledge, with a focus on the utility of both disciplinary knowledge and knowledge from the social sciences and humanities.

The limitations of partial citizenship: health care institutions underpinned with heteronormative ideals.

Tensions between apparent rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer/questioning people and the continued prevalence of heteronormative health care practice emerged in research with older women who self-identified as lesbian. Having already faced considerable exclusionary institutional practices in their lives, these women expressed anticipatory dread of the erasure of their lives in residential or long-term care. Drawing on the framework of sexual citizenship, this article critiques the disjuncture between the legal reality and the lived reality of LGBTQ people and suggests that social or political rights of full citizenship remain tenuous or absent in residential care settings.

Integrating experiential learning into a double degree masters program in nursing and health informatics.

In Canada there are few nurses who have advanced practice competencies in nursing informatics. This is a significant issue for regional health authorities, governments and electronic health record vendors in Canada who are implementing electronic health records. Few Schools of Nursing provide formalized opportunities for nurses to develop informatics competencies.

Dialectic of the university: a critique of instrumental reason in graduate nursing education.

Our analysis in this paper unfolds on two levels: a critique of the 'realities' of graduate nursing education and an argument to sustain its 'ideals'. We open for discussion an aspect of graduate nursing education dominated by instrumental reason, namely the research industry, using an internal critique approach developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Early Frankfurt School. As we explain, internal critique arises out of, and relies on, the mismatch between goals, or 'ideals', and existing realities.

Bringing ourselves into view: disclosure as epistemological and ontological production of a lesbian subject.

Using Gadamerian hermeneutics as a methodology and feminist philosophical thought as an analytical framework, this study explores understandings of experiences of disclosure of sexual orientation for older 'lesbian' women. The study draws on an interpretative inquiry in which participants theoretically align with sexual identity categories with both an ontological and an epistemological purpose and later move away from or even disassociate from the 'category' (of lesbian). Reflecting on these interpretations, that of the epistemological and the ontological production of a subject, we ask: What does it mean then to say I am a lesbian? This is where a tension exists: how is it that in spite of the incongruencies of what constitutes a lesbian, and the apparent ambiguity of people to name themselves, we continue to act (as health care providers and researchers) as if the category itself is meaningful and stable? A feminist lens provides an inroad to consider sexuality as practices, rather than as fixed identity; practices that are constituted within the discursive, social and material realities of a life as well as within political and ideological systems in which one resides.

Dilemmas, tetralemmas, reimagining the electronic health record.

With the transition from paper-based to computer-based records, nursing practice shifts to computerized documentation of care in the electronic health record (EHR). Viewed not only as an electronic document, but as an instrument of modern economic and technological ideology that serves organizational goals of cost-efficiency, the EHR can be perceived as creating a dilemma for a patient-centered nursing practice. Viewing the EHR as relying solely on the use of standardized languages begets a number of questions and furthers the dilemma for nurses.

Where is nursing in the electronic health care record?

The authors explore the possibilities for documenting professional nursing practice in an electronic health record. Recognizing that there are a variety of approaches to electronic documentation, the intent of this discussion is to generate a general rather than a particular approach to this issue. Nurses themselves must determine the ways in which professional nursing care will be captured in the electronic systems used in their facilities.

From Braxton Hicks to preterm labour: the constitution of risk in pregnancy.

With the recent introduction of preterm birth prevention programs there has been a shift in our understanding of what the presence of contractions during pregnancy means and a reconstituting of risk in ways that position increasing numbers of women at risk for preterm birth. This paper highlights the findings of a study exploring the influences of risk discourses on women's experiences of preterm labour. The primary goals of this institutional ethnographic study were to describe the effects of societal discourses, institutional structures, and nursing work processes on the everyday lives of childbearing women experiencing preterm labour.

The meaning of the nurse's presence during childbirth.

Objective: The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop new understandings of what it means to women in labor for a nurse to be present during childbirth.

Design: Hermeneutic inquiry was used to explore the phenomenon of nursing presence during childbirth. The purpose of questioning in hermeneutic phenomenology is to stimulate thoughtful reflection and deeper exploration of the subject's experiences.

Cultivating a worldly repose: the contribution of Sally Gadow's work to interpretive inquiry.

This paper discusses the contribution that the work of Sally Gadow makes to understandings of interpretive inquiry and it's potential to inform and influence nursing practice, research, and education. The discussion draws on several of Gadow's published works that make explicit her understandings of what it means to be interpretive, to be open to multiple truths, to hear multiple voices, to have a history, to be experienced, and to recognize agency in language. Situating this discussion of Gadow's contribution in opposition to a metaphysics of genius is intended to move our understanding of particular work past the subjectivity that produced it, past the subjectivized responses to the work, past the reporting on myself - my thoughts, my perspectives, my experiences - to explore, to see the worthwhileness or even the possibilities of exploring the work itself and the worlds it evokes.