Considering the "Bitter Rivalry" Within the Context of European and Colonial History of Women Healers.

Polarized opinion among nurses regarding two 19th century nurses is damaging in its divisiveness. The nursing works of Nightingale and Seacole in the 19th century are presented within the context of European and Colonial history involving the rise to power of the medical profession, the decline of women healers, and the beginning of professional nursing in an effort to understand the factors contributing to the polarization. A Supplemental Digital Content video abstract is available at http://links.lww.com/ANS/A55 .

Embracing the Focus of the Discipline of Nursing: Critical Caring Pedagogy.

PURPOSE: To present a theoretical model that grounds teaching and learning in nursing in the focus, values, and ideals of nursing as a discipline. ORGANIZING CONSTRUCTS: The critical caring pedagogy model was formed by integrating Falk-Rafael's theory of critical caring in public health nursing, Noddings' philosophy of caring education, and Chinn's theory of peace and power. METHODS: The model of critical caring pedagogy was developed by logical analysis of the three organizing constructs and the conceptual relationships between and among these constructs. The analysis was informed by the authors' experiences implementing the theoretical constructs in teaching and learning. CONCLUSIONS: When nurse educators ground teaching and learning practice in nursing's own theoretical and philosophic foundation, they teach nursing in powerful ways that show nursing values and ideals through action, revealing deeper meanings of the words that form texts, lectures, and objectives set forth in a curriculum outline. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Nursing students who experience education that is grounded in nursing's own disciplinary focus acquire an appreciation of nursing's disciplinary knowledge grounded in experience, paving the way for grounding their eventual practice in nursing theoretical perspectives.

Peace and power: a theory of emancipatory group process.

PURPOSE: To present the theoretical basis for the group process known as "Peace and Power." ORGANIZING CONSTRUCT: A dialectic between two dominant forms of power-peace powers and power-over powers-forms the basis for a synthesis that yields an emancipatory group process characterized by praxis, empowerment, awareness, cooperation, and evolvement for individuals and groups. METHODS: Critical analysis of prevailing competitive group dynamics and the ideals of cooperative group dynamics was conducted to project the potential for achieving group interactions that yield profound changes in the direction of justice, empowerment, and well-being for all. CONCLUSIONS: The theoretical framework of "Peace and Power" is consistent with characteristics of emancipatory integrity that are vital for social change. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The processes of "Peace and Power" can be used to create peaceful, cooperative interactions among nurses, with other health professionals, with patients and families, and in communities.

"Towards justice in health": an exemplar of speaking truth to power.

A critical textual analysis of the 6 issues of Towards Justice in Health, a magazine published by Nurses for Social Responsibility (NSR) between 1992 and 1995, makes visible their work. True to their purpose, NSR provided an alternative and courageous voice on the political nature of health and health care that was largely missing in mainstream nursing literature at that time. Towards Justice in Health both documents the emergence of the new economic world order and concomitant shift to the right in Canadian politics during the early 1990s with its impacts on health care and the nursing workplace and provides a grassroots response.

The primacy of relationships: a study of public health nursing practice from a critical caring perspective.

Critical caring is a midrange theory proposed as a framework to guide public health nursing practice. This article reports findings of a study that examined the relevance of the theory to the practice of expert public health nurses (PHNs). Twenty-six PHNs participated in this study: 10 in interviews and 16 in 2 focus groups. Findings support the relevance of critical caring to PHN practice, explicated, and further refined the theory through the richness of participants' practice accounts As such, it has potential as a tool of resistance to forces that limit PHNs working to their full scope of practice.

Witnessing social injustice downstream and advocating for health equity upstream: "the trombone slide" of nursing.

Two aspects of a study examining the congruence of critical caring theory with public health nursing practice are reported. They confirm a congruence between expert public health nursing practice and the theory in terms of (a) a caring/social justice ethics that underpins practice and (b) the relevance to their practice of the carative health promoting process of contributing to the creation of supportive and sustainable physical, social, political, and economic environments. Public health nurse participants encountered many barriers to a practice underpinned by a caring/social justice ethic, some of which limited their moral agency.

Instrumental care and human-centered caring: rhetoric and lived reality.

This article explores the nursing discourse on relational caring as a context for examining the authors' recent lived realities with the health care system. Two narratives detail experiences of instrumental care and human-centered caring as the authors journeyed with a loved one who was dying. Commonalities across the stories are identified and caring analyzed using Halldorsdottir's ways of being with another. From weaving an analysis of the realities with the literature emerges a recognition of a critical turning point in nursing and health care.

Globalization and global health: toward nursing praxis in the global community.

Considerable evidence suggests that neocolonialism, in the form of economic globalization as it has evolved since the 1980s, contributes significantly to the poverty and immense global burden of disease experienced by peoples of the developing world, as well as to escalating environmental degradation of alarming proportions. Nursing's fundamental responsibilities to promote health, prevent disease, and alleviate suffering call for the expression of caring for humanity and environment through political activism at local, national, and international levels to bring about reforms of the current global economic order.

Speaking truth to power: nursing's legacy and moral imperative.

Critical caring has been proposed as a mid-range theory to guide public health nursing. One of its carative health promoting processes, contributing to the creation of supportive and sustainable physical, social, political, and economic environments, is particularly suited to enacting Nightingale's legacy of political action as an expression of caring. Increasing evidence supports the link between broad societal influences on health inequities. Relative and absolute poverty are significant influences on health and contribute significantly to differential health statuses of populations within and between countries. Nurses, who practice at the intersection of public policy and personal lives, are, therefore, ideally situated and morally obligated to include political advocacy and efforts to influence health public policy in their practice. The health of the public and the future of the profession may depend on it.

Advancing nursing theory through theory-guided practice: the emergence of a critical caring perspective.

Critical caring is proposed as a hybrid, midrange theory that builds on nursing science and critical feminist theories. As such, it has the potential to root public health nursing practice in an expanded nursing caring science that reincorporates the social justice agenda characteristic of early public health nursing practice but not featured prominently in contemporary nursing theories. Critical caring transforms the carative processes of Watson's theory into 7 carative health-promoting processes that form the "core" of public health nursing practice and reflect the legacy and reality of public health nursing practice.

The effectiveness of feminist pedagogy in empowering a community of learners.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a pedagogy grounded in feminist ideals has the potential to empower students to make changes consistent with those ideals in their personal and professional lives. In Phase I, qualitative data were collected through e-mail questionnaires from students in two nursing schools, one in Canada and one in the United States. Findings were used to identify an appropriate tool to measure the empowering influence of feminist pedagogy. In Phase 2, a pretest-posttest design used Barrett's Power as Knowing Participation in Change Tool (PKPCT) to measure student empowerment. A clinical setting was added in a third baccalaureate nursing program. A total of 218 students participated in seven course offerings-four classroom and three clinical. One hundred one matched pairs were obtained, for an overall response rate of 46%. Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that overall empowerment scores, as measured by the PKPCT, and classroom empowerment (CE), as measured by the addition of a variable (i.e., the ability to contribute in class), increased significantly from pretest to posttest. Interaction between Sites 1 and 2 was also significant. Regression analysis indicated posttest CE scores added to pretest PKPCT and CE scores provided a strong model to predict overall empowerment scores, measured by the PKPCT at Time 2 (R2 = .703). Despite limitations related to loss of follow up and low response rates at one site, the results of this study supported both hypotheses: that empowerment would increase over the course of the class in which feminist pedagogical principles were used, and that classroom empowerment is likely to extend beyond the classroom to personal and work environments.