Introduction
Nurse educators make efforts to offer and exhibit efficient teaching in nursing courses. Similar to teachers in other fields of high school learning, nurse instructors have issues regarding the writing/reading approaches and the attitudes of student nurses. Learners also express worry about their personal skills as they start to receive and practice nursing courses (Martinez, 2011). Educators of student nurses should evaluate themselves to ensure that their teaching practices are ethically sound and follow a standard curriculum that provides nurses with the expert skills required in health practice (Bastable, 2014; Wolffensperger, 2010).
The peculiarity of nursing students is that they are already literate when they are admitted into the school. Nevertheless, most of these students do not have the basic literacies required for nursing practice. For instance, student nurses may have the ability to interpret medical briefs, but they may be unwilling to deduce the indications in these briefs. The assessment and development of academic literature are traditionally structured methods with precise procedures and practices for inclusion, and it is important to encourage students’ evolution at various stages of their nursing careers.
This makes it necessary to combine pedagogical methods from tertiary courses with methods that support scientific development among young learners. These strategies can be remodeled and improved for nursing students, concurrently directing their internship into nursing practices with scholarly literature while exhibiting the methods that should be used for the adult learners. This paper highlights the methods wherein primary and adolescent teaching methods may direct the teaching of academics for nursing students.
Pedagogy Philosophy: Apprenticeship Orientation
The complex tasks associated with introducing students to new academic literature and activities have been highlighted (Bartholomae, 2004). This complex nature is characteristic of nursing pedagogy and it is important to support nursing students through apprentice methods. The application of the apprenticeship pedagogy will be based on Vygotsky’s social constructivist theory of academic pedagogy wherein the learners’ involvement in traditional practices with the supervision of more experienced companions enables the learner to adopt methods for reasoning and apply more advanced methods to the practice being taught.
This process may be structured for clearly identifying the teacher’s responsibilities. The instructor designs students’ trips from common to professional nursing ideas and practices. Finally, the instructor teaches the learner how to practice the identified ideas. In this method of teaching, the expertise of the teacher is the core of the pedagogical procedure. Nevertheless, learning occurs only after the instructor successfully applies that professionalism to create meanings for learners, lead the learners from the common to the professional practices, and introduce them into the uncommon awareness community as dynamic, critical members. At the core of this pedagogical ideology are the major academic ideologies of apprenticeship and nursing.
Nursing practice requires information and acceptance of the economic, health, and social ideologies and elements that occur around the various areas of nursing practice (Bastable, 2014). Generally, the nurses develop the ability to interact and communicate like nurses. Successful nursing practice necessitates the skill to employ standards and practices of the health care traditions. These practices may comprise timeliness, appearance, communication skills, record taking, and nursing practices outlined for pedagogical purposes in nursing practice. Similarly, significant nursing practices comprise regular interactions and discussions with colleagues, instructors, and other health care personnel.
The apprenticeship orientation pedagogical method originated from the need to successfully introduce students into the subject of the instructor-learner environment by highlighting key procedures of the subject, then outlining, establishing, managing, and including students in real health care activities that involve the related practices. The actions of the teaching process will be structured as an apprenticeship. Simultaneously, the pedagogical method will acknowledge that apprenticeship is more complicated than a mere group of activities and that the activities only become clear and significant via the interactions that occur in the apprenticed communications. The next section of the paper highlights the learning theory that guides the pedagogy of apprenticeship in nursing.
Learning Theory: Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive apprenticeship is a branch of the social learning theories, which is defined as learning based on intellectual knowledge, instead of physical, abilities and procedures (Bastable, 2014). One individual cannot participate in an intellectual apprenticeship but must depend on professional exhibition and mentoring during the early stages of learning. Students are tasked with activities somewhat more complex than their abilities and must depend on support from and partnership with colleagues and instructors to accomplish the assigned tasks. Students must collaborate with more qualified professionals and grow from a point of watching, to a point of participating. The methods of learning in the cognitive apprenticeship are universal and become more complicated and diverse as the students gain more knowledge. One significant benefit of the cognitive apprenticeship is that it allows that learner to see the restrained, tacit essentials of professional performance that cannot be explained in the conventional classroom.
Legal/Ethical Issues associated with Apprenticeship and Related Systems
Even though cognitive apprenticeships usually transpire automatically, some teaching methods are symbols of the concept and maybe deliberately performed to aid teaching. Deliberate learning via cognitive apprenticeship necessitates the exposure of inferred procedures to students to enable them to practice (Bastable, 2014). The fundamental model comprises modeling, mentoring, thinking, vocalization, and investigation. These methods denote the professionals’ activities and the students’ cognitive apprenticeship activities, which include watching, repetition, and thinking.
Situatedness, legitimate peripheral participation, and guided participation have all been associated with cognitive apprenticeship. The process of situated learning involves active learning, which occurs through an individual’s involvement in an original activity or environment (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The legitimate peripheral participation is also closely related to the cognitive apprenticeship theory. In the cognitive apprenticeship, the student who basically watches the activities is viewed as a legal exterior contributor. Essentially, this title legalizes observation as a pedagogical action. The assumption that a new student will fully participate in an activity is an unethical assumption.
A researcher must not focus only on the entire tasks to be performed and their criteria for evaluation but must also consider the minor activities that make up the entire tasks. A student may receive preliminary knowledge by watching a holistic procedure from the side. Immediately the entire task is comprehended, the student can move from a passive to an active participation position, with the student performing lesser, constituent segments of the larger task while getting repetitions of opinion from the more skilled professional. This stage shifts the student from being a legal passive contributor to the inbound position, starting to relate more with elements within the scenery.
Another theory closely related to cognitive apprenticeship is guided participation. In guided participation guidance is offered implicitly, as the individual naturally engages in daily activities (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This aspect of cognitive apprenticeship will only occur in the student’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), an energetic area located just outside the student’s present skill zone. The ZPD of a student moves relative to the student’s skill development. The area between real and prospective performance is evaluated via social communication between the student and an individual who is more qualified. A research study used a four-stage idea to illustrate the recursive and dynamic procedure that students work in their ZPDs and successfully adopt skills, only to restart with newly described ZPDs (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Legal issues may arise from apprenticeship. The fact that apprentice learning requires that the learner performs the tasks to learn, it is possible that the teacher may assign tasks to the learner that are above the abilities of the learner. This will expose the activity to risk and may result in fatality of the patients in the health care system.
Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to present one pedagogical philosophy and one learning theory associated with education in nursing. The pedagogical philosophy discussed in the paper is the apprenticeship orientation and this philosophy was developed based on the cognitive apprenticeship teaching theory. Both ideologies were discussed in details using literature that directly relates to the ideologies. The legal and ethical issues associated with the application of the pedagogical approach were identified by analyzing different elements that make up the apprenticeship orientation pedagogical philosophy. Apprenticeship orientation is a sufficient method of transferring knowledge and skill in the nursing profession.
References
Bartholomae, D. (2004). Writing on the margins: Essays on composition and teaching. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.
Bastable, S. B. (2014). Nurse as educators: Principles of teaching and learning for nursing practice. Burlington, MA: Jones and Barlett.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Martinez, G. (2011). Literacy success: Fifty students from areas throughout the United States share their stories. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(3), 221-231.
Wolffensperger, Y. (2010). Caring mentoring for academic literacy: A case study of a teacher education college in Israel. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 18(3), 249-267.