Using nursing theory in nursing education

Pilson, Erin M.

doi:10.1016/j.aorn.2009.01.004

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Volume 89, Issue 2 , Page 266, February 2009

Using nursing theory in nursing education

Towson University Department of Nursing, Towson, MD

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The article “Perioperative nursing competency” (Vol 88, September 2008) addresses a key issue in the practice of nursing education. Author James X. Stobinski, RN, MSN, CNOR, uses a theoretical framework to address the problems of determining perioperative competency. Benner's Novice to Expert Theoretical Framework provides a sound basis for the author's discussion of nursing competency in a subspecialty area. He integrates the theory well as he describes the various ways one obtains an RN license, postlicensure education, and graduate-level education.

Carper's Fundamental Patterns of Knowing in Nursing¹ also can be applied to the findings in this article. Carper describes four patterns of knowing: empirics, ethics, personal knowing, and aesthetics. While a nurse may obtain his or her empiric and ethical knowledge in nursing school, it can be argued that personal knowing and aesthetics are learned postlicensure, beginning with subspecialty training. Chinn and Kramer² expanded on Carper's original theory to include the development of praxis, described as emancipatory knowledge.

Individual nursing praxis involves continually noticing what is happening in practice, asking critical questions about that practice, creating changes to shift practice in a desired direction, and noticing what happens as a result.²^(p16)

Mr Stobinski's article makes it clear that perioperative education needs to be included not only in nursing programs, but also as a standardized educational component during a novice nurse's orientation in institutions. Our discipline is rich with nursing theory that we do not draw upon nearly as much as we should. One of the tenets of nursing as a discipline and perioperative nursing as a subspecialty within the discipline is to teach and guide novice nurses to become caring expert nurses. To that end, subspecialty training must become theory-based and standardized to allow a novice nurse to proceed through the patterns of knowing and to develop praxis. I concur with the views of this author and thank him for addressing this important issue.

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