703 - Opportunities or Challenges? Developing Sound Educational Pedagogy

Ensuring students are provided with a sound educational experience in nursing school is not easy, particularly with the dynamic nature of healthcare. This presents nurse educators with many challenges as well as opportunities. This session will provide an overview to many of the challenges facing nurse educators today as well as opportunities they have to provide pedagogically sound experiences for nursing students.

The nature of healthcare is ever changing. Because of that, nursing school curricula are dynamic entities and are never really finished. This requires nurse educators to stay current both in the practice arena and the literature. More than that, they need to keep an eye to the future, just to keep up with the changes. This rapidly changing environment is unlike anything previously seen or done in nursing. Nurse educators have a great opportunity to ensure nursing students are prepared for the realities of practice through confronting the challenges, welcoming the ambiguity, and striving for sound educational pedagogies in their programs. We will describe the top challenges facing nursing education today (based on a literature search) and explore opportunities to address the challenges.

Through the literature and faculty experiences, the presenters present major challenges facing nursing education today that can greatly affect how students learn. They include lack resources, curricula, DEI, student relationships, pay inequality, and practice changes. In this session, together we will explore realistic strategies to turn these challenges into opportunities. Understanding the connection between a sound educational pedagogy and the current challenges described is just the first part of the solution. Tangible, attainable strategies will be discussed and discovered during this important session.

The challenges facing nurse educators are many and all of them in some way disrupt the learning. The speakers and participants will problem solve together strategies to strengthen educational pedagogy in part, by turning their challenges into opportunities.