Professional Experience Placement

This editorial by Phil Darbyshire (2011) applies today. He states  nurse educators are “in the transformation business… Transform(ing) students into safe, skilled and self-confident practitioners“. The editorial challenges nurse educators to view themselves differently, to step up and meet the challenge of joining other disciplines in being more scholarly. The author calls for nurses to teach, be scholarly and research learning and teaching in nursing. He lambasts nurses about the excuses they may make about being too busy to research or publish. He points out that nurse educators have a duty to add to the body of knowledge in nursing to ensure the next generation of nurses have scholarly evidence to support their teaching and learning practice.

Darbyshire states nurse educators “transform clinical, interpersonal and ethical problems from potential career-ending setbacks into opportunities for deep learning and personal and professional mastery”. He indicates this is achieved by challenging the prejudice that research and teaching are of value in the ‘real-world’ of nursing practice and nurse educators are key to transforming this perspective. Darbyshire vests nurse educators with modelling and demonstrating the value of research and teaching. You can also view the Youtube clip of the 2010 Vivian Bullwinkel lecture  on the same topic.

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