Mary P. Bourke
Indiana University Kokomo, USA
Title: Guide to Teaching in the Concept Based Environment
Biography
Biography: Mary P. Bourke
Abstract
Statement of the problem: Globally, nursing students are frustrated
because of the amount of reading, memorization, failures, and content processing required in traditional nursing curriculum. A growing body of literature suggest that management of curricular content is one of the key challenges in nursing education. The body of knowledge and skills required for nursing practice today has dramatically changed in the last thirty years, but the teaching methodology and curriculum has not.
The result has been coined “Content Saturation’’. A contributing factor includes Knowledge and skills necessary for practice today has grown exponentially due to technology, advances in medicine, and changes in practice. Another contributing factor is a teacher-centered pedagogy, which has been the traditional format in nursing education. This type of pedagogy reinforces that content not covered, students will not learn. The enormity of nursing Content that exists today makes this impossible, thus faculty fail. The solution is a Conceptual pedagogy that emphasizes concepts across contexts, the life span, and the health-illness continuum.
Concepts provide the organizational framework and structure for the curriculum and courses. Teaching becomes student centered using instructional strategies focused on conceptual learning. However, after planning and implementation, leadership does not know how to help faculty teach in a concept-based curriculum. The reason a concept based curriculum has difficulty is because faculty do not understand student centered pedagogy and how to teach concepts at an introductory, application and mastery level in layers of complexity across the curriculum. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce a “Guide to Teaching in a Concept Based Curriculum”.