the purpose of nursing education is to enable nurses to engage in nursing as a practice
then, because this involves the cultivation of particular virtues, education for nursing is
a form of moral education. Thinking of nurse education as a form of moral education
serves to remind us of the interconnectedness of ideas and actions, of reason and
emotion, of character and behaviour. It serves, in MacIntyre’s terms to reduce the
fragmentation of modernity. Thus while the education of nurses involves some training
(as noted above) as well as the learning of propositional and practical knowledge this
must all take place in recognition of the aims of nursing practice. And if the practice of
nursing is, as I have claimed, primarily concerned with human betterment then it
matters a great deal not only what nurses do but how they go about doing it. In other
words, the safe and competent completion of tasks alone is insufficient to define good
nursing. Rather good nursing requires the safe and competent completion of tasks
undertaken with an explicit regard for the well-being of patients. That is, good nursing
requires a good will (in the strong sense) towards patients, the cultivation of the virtues
of nursing, and the development of a professional phronesis. None of these can be
considered without taking cognisance of the others.
Teaching for good will, virtues, and professional phronesis
If this is true then those involved in the teaching of nurses (let us call them ‘nurse
teachers’ for the time being) will need to work out how it might be best to go about
teaching for good will (in the strong sense), the virtues of nursing, and professional
phronesis. It would be a mistake to imagine there might be a simple, ready-made
pedagogy available for nurse teachers merely to adopt as a teaching method in order to
achieve this aim. For this would be to assume teaching is no more than the application
of method whereas, as stated in the opening chapter of this thesis, teaching, like nursing,
is a complex professional and moral practice, a practice moreover that can be described
in MacIntyrean terms. One implication of this is that if we are serious about teaching
nurses to engage with nursing as a practice then nurse teachers can go some way
towards this aim by engaging in a practice (or practices) themselves. In so doing nurse
teachers can begin to illustrate what it is to pursue the goods internal to a practice. That
is to say that if nurse teachers are engaged in a practice then it becomes possible for
students to imagine how engaging with a practice, rather than merely undertaking a set
of tasks, might bring with it goods other than external goods. I will return to this later in
this chapter, for now it is necessary to outline the sorts of questions raised by the idea
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