Creating a Caring Science Curriculum

Book excerpt: The hallmark text for nursing faculty seeking to promote the transformative teaching of caring science, this book reflects the paramount scholarship of caring science educators. The volume intertwines visionary thinking with blueprints, living exemplars, and dynamic directions for the application of fundamental principles. It features emancipatory teaching/learning scholarship, and student/teacher, relation/evaluation models for adoption into education and practice regimens. Divided into five units, the text addresses the history of the caring curriculum revolution and its reemergence as a powerful presence within nursing. Unit II introduces intellectual and strategic blueprints for caring-based education, including action-oriented approaches for faculty-student relations, teaching/learning skills, emancipatory pedagogical practices, critical-reflective-creative approaches to evolving human consciousness, and power relation dynamics. The third unit addresses curriculum structure and design, the evolution of a caring-based college of nursing, the philosophy of caring-human science, caring in advanced practice education, caring as a pedagogical approach to nursing education, and teaching-learning professional caring based on Watson's theory of human caring. Unit IV explores an alternative approach to evaluation. The final unit explores the future of the caring science curriculum as a way of emancipating the human spirit, with caritas nursing as a transformative model. Key Features: Expands upon the premiere resource for maximizing caring science in education, research, and practice (Bevis and Watson's Toward a Caring Curriculum: A New Pedagogy for Nursing, 1989) Provides a broad application of caring science for graduate educators, students, and nursing leaders Features case studies from two leading U.S. and Canadian universities Distills the expertise of world-renowned scholars Includes reflexive exercises to maximize student engagement