The Teacher-Scholar Project: how to help faculty groups develop scholarly skills.

Nursing education's challenge in the new millennium is to prepare all nurses as scholars. With many nurse educators feeling like impostors when it comes to scholarship, this is no small task. Turning the millenial challenge into an opportunity, this article describes how a collaborative faculty development initiative is turning a National League for Nursing Center of Excellence school's "scholar-impostors" into teacher-scholars. This Teacher-Scholar Project will interest those in teaching intensive schools of nursing or in teaching tracks in research-intensive institutions.

Dare To Share: a unique approach to presenting and publishing.

Have you ever wished there was a reference to recommend to students or colleagues interested in making presentations or publishing? Now there is a book that can help you do both. Written by a nurse educator and meant as a portable mentor, Dare to Share is an example-filled guidebook that introduces a 4-step approach proven successful in preparing nurses to present and publish.

Joy stealing: 10 mean games faculty play and how to stop the gaming.

This article opens with an exemplar of Wendy, a nurse educator, whose exuberance is drained by conflicted relationships with faculty colleagues. Corroborating Wendy's story are 10 joy-stealing faculty games that surfaced from the spontaneous writings of 261 nurse educators attending the National League for Nursing's 2005 Summit. Educational research that describes the sociopolitical context and the psychoemotional fallout from such games elucidates why turning nurse educators into passionate scholars may stop the gaming.

Imagine Something Different: How a Group Approach to Scholarly Faculty Development Can Turn Joy-Stealing Competition Into Scholarly Productivity.

As academic institutions across the country raise the scholarly bar for retention, promotion, and tenure, academic leaders are being asked to scholar-ready nursing faculty. With the retirement of senior scholars and too few scholar-mentors to go around, leaders often find themselves squeezed between scholarly expectations on the rise and faculty groups less than ready to meet those expectations. Today's nursing faculty present a formidable scholarly development challenge. A diverse mix of master's-prepared clinicians and recent graduates from doctor of philosophy and doctor of nursing practice programs, they come with a broad range of scholarly learning needs. These inequities not only leave many faculty feeling like scholar-impostors but also they can breed competitions that erode collegial bonds and sow the seeds of incivilities that steal scholarly joy, slow scholarly progress, and stress academic workplaces. What if leaders began imagining something different for themselves and with faculty groups? This is what can happen when leaders expand their perspective on scholarly faculty development from individual challenge to collective responsibility. More essay than research paper, this article describes how scholarly joy-stealing patterns can infiltrate faculty groups, shares thought leaders' visions for supportive scholarly communities, and offers strategies leaders can use to invite faculty groups to co-create cultures of scholarly caring.

Halfway between receiving and giving: a relational analysis of doctorate-prepared nurse-scholars' first 5 years after graduation.

The longitudinal, phenomenological study described in this article is unique in exploring doctorally prepared nurses' lives during their first 5 years after graduation. Despite individual differences, there was a definite pattern in the way the 16 female participants internalized a doctoral identity. During the first year, the women asked themselves, "How big do I want my world to be?" In the second year, they were overwhelmed by trying to prove themselves because they equated doctoral identity with conducting research and scholarship. During the third year, they prioritized gradually focusing and determining the direction of their professional endeavors. In the fourth year, they "spent a lot of time creating my piece of the world." By the fifth year, they valued their accomplishments, "This is my world and I am proud of it." In between receiving and giving, most participants developed a network of colleagues who mentored them as scholars. Given that relationship and scholarly identity are linked in the nursing literature, this relational feminist analysis suggests the need for doctoral nurse educators and students to replace the single mentor-mentee model with a collegial one that allows them to mentor one another as scholars during and after doctoral studies.

Turn accusations into affirmations: transform nurses into published authors.

Although nurse educators bemoan the fact that many of their students cannot write, writing for publication is fast becoming an expectation of master's and doctorally prepared nurses. Since master's students must submit a publishable product to graduate from the authors' program, a writing-for-publication workshop was developed that introduces sequential steps in the publishing process, including peer editing. This article outlines the systematic way in which graduate students are introduced to writing for publication. Strategies are presented that turn faculty and students into a community of scholarly caring.

How a faculty group's peer mentoring of each other's scholarship can enhance retention and recruitment.

At a time when schools of nursing seek to retain and recruit faculty ready to meet promotion and tenure requirements, many faculty are less than able to fulfill scholarly expectations. As senior scholars begin to retire, today's faculty groups are a mix of master's-prepared clinicians and recent graduates with professional (doctor of nursing practice) or research doctorates. This means that novice and midcareer faculty often lack the educational preparation for and/or a proper introduction into the scholarly role. A transition that can take 5 years or more, internalizing a scholarly identity is a process that unfolds over time in the course of presenting, publishing, and conducting research with the support of scholarly colleagues. With an eye toward easing this developmental/relational transition, chairs and deans search for professional development approaches to meet the diverse scholarly learning needs of a mixed faculty group. Given a dearth of scholar-mentors, professional development approaches that engage faculty groups in making scholarship a cooperative venture and a collective responsibility are appealing. This article explores whether a project that systematically prepared a faculty group to peer-mentor each other's scholarly success from hire to retire holds promise for fostering academic workplaces productive and pleasurable enough to attract and retain the best and the brightest.

Take the civility challenge: how partnership practices can turn toxic workplaces terrific.

Terrific or toxic? If your workplace is like that of 90% of the nurse educators surveyed by the author, conflicted interactions with colleagues and administrators are draining your joy. This article shares 2 exemplars that illustrate how mutually beneficial partnerships between faculty colleagues turned toxic workplaces terrific. After a hands-on introduction to a set of evidence-based partnership practices, you will be ready to take the civility challenge by negotiating conscious and contracted collaborations that can turn your workplace terrific, 1 partnership at a time.

An optimist's guide for cultivating civility among academic nurses.

Nurse educators yearn to teach in zestful workplaces where faculty and administrators work and play well together. Even when their interactions with professional colleagues are stressful, many still believe that zestful academic workplaces are possible. How can educators bridge the gap when a zestful ideal becomes a stressful reality? Since some report that the quality of their professional relationships differentiates stressful from zestful workplaces, relationships are a good place to start. The findings from an emerging body of social and biological research concur that human beings are a nurturing species wired for relationship. Interpersonal neurobiologists are finding that relational tending and mending are every much a part of the human response to stress as fight or flight. Given scientific support for the transformative power of connected relationships, this article poses and seeks to answer a single question. What if nurse educators, instead of fighting or fleeing when under stress, tended to and mended their professional relationships?

Passionate scholarship 2001-2010: a vision for making academe safer for joyous risk-takers.

What is passionate scholarship? According to students and graduates from a nursing doctoral program interviewed 10 years ago, passionate scholars must risk committing to a personally meaningful and socially relevant topic close to the heart. This insight spawned a string of exploratory inquiries and educational interventions in search of the "ideal conditions" that foster passionate scholarship. Updating the findings of that original study published in Advances in Nursing Science in 2001, this article describes a 3-year, faculty development initiative. Beyond increasing scholarly productivity, the findings suggest that turning faculty groups into communities of scholarly caring can make academic environments safer for passionate risk-takers.