Browsing by Author "Sealock, Kara"

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    Beyond Role Transition: Specialty Nurses’ Narratives of Learning to Teach
    (2023-06-02) House-Kokan, Michelle Anne Marie; Groen, Janet Elizabeth; Potvin, Bernard; Sealock, Kara
    In Canada, specialty nurse educators are typically hired for their clinical expertise and are not required to have training in pedagogical methodology or have past experience as educators (Bagley et al., 2018; Hoffman, 2019; Shapiro, 2018). Currently, little is known about how expert specialty nurses learn to teach post-licensure specialty education. Today, there is a critical shortfall of Registered Nurses in Canada (Ariste et al., 2019; Canadian Nurses Association, 2023). At the same time, an increase in patient acuity and complexity has highlighted the need for specialized nursing care and thus specialized post-licensure education (British Columbia Government, 2020; Lavoie-Tremblay et al., 2019). Despite the rising demand for specialty nurses, there is a parallel critical shortage of nurse educators at all levels of nursing education, including at the post-licensure specialty level (British Columbia Institute of Technology, 2021; Boamah, 2021). A deeper understanding of how post-licensure specialty nurse educators learn to teach is crucial to preparing and supporting both new and current specialty nurse educators. This qualitative inquiry arises from my experience as a post-licensure specialty nurse educator and faculty development lead. With this inquiry, I expand the limited scholarship in this area. Employing a narrative inquiry methodology, and a conceptual framework derived from the nursing, teacher, and higher education literature and informed by adult learning theory, I explore and describe specialty nurse educators’ process of learning to teach, along with factors that help or hinder this process. Key findings from this study include the holistic nature of the journey of learning to teach specialty nursing, learning to teach through caring, and learning to teach as a relational process.
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    Understanding Empathic Engagement of a Fourth-Year Nursing Student Through Narrative Inquiry
    (2019-05-02) Sealock, Kara; Jubas, Kaela; Groen, Janet Elizabeth; Rosenal, Tom W.
    There has been substantial research on empathy and the components of empathy for nursing education and nursing practice (Alligood, 1992; 2007; Evans et al., 1998; Gagan, 1983; Kalisch, 1973; Kunyk & Olson, 2001; Morse et al., 1992; Ward, 2016; Ward et al., 2012) but very little research has addressed how students come to understand empathic engagement, a social phenomenon of human connection. Empathic engagement is a liminal relational experience, based on the principles of empathy and humanistic values that leads to a spatiotemporal phenomenon of human interconnectedness. Empathic engagement moves beyond feeling empathy for a person, beyond empathic concern and elements of cognitive empathy. In this study, I explored explore how fourth-year nursing students come to understand and recognize empathic engagement in their work and how students make meaning from this unique phenomenon in nursing practice. This study used narrative inquiry by way of written and visual narratives, followed by a face-to-face semi-structured conversation between the participant and the researcher about the participant’s experience. “Humans are story-telling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2). The use of narratives enabled participants to express his or her constructed and objective reality and to articulate “the temporality and liminality of human beings’ interpretation of their lives” (Sandelowski, 1991, p. 161). Fulford (1999) notes, “stories are how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves, and how we often do all three at once” (p. 9). The outcomes of this study introduced four phases of empathic engagement and will add new knowledge to nursing curricula addressing humanistic values of nursing practice.