curriculum implications. The lecturer who exemplifies the practice of teaching will
similarly illustrate to students something about how being engaged with a practice has
internal goods that are worth striving for. In addition, the lecturer will have genuine
concerns about how far pedagogic and curriculum arrangements enable rather than
hinder the development of learners towards the ideal of the professional phronimos. In
this sense, teachers as facilitators of learning (rather than as transmitters of information)
will seek to develop pedagogies that are student centred, that encourage deep rather than
surface learning, and that enable learners to develop as learners. This is particularly
important in a practice-based occupation such as nursing because remaining a safe and
competent practitioner requires skills of lifelong learning together with an openness to
challenges to current practice and a willingness to adopt changes in practice in the light
of compelling evidence. Teaching methods that may encourage these things will
include, but are not limited to, approaches such as peer and self appraisal and
assessment, work-based learning, enquiry or problem based learning, seminars and so
on. This is to say that it includes any teaching method that moves away from an over-
reliance on didactic lectures as the primary method of instruction (although we should
not forget that there is, of course, a place for lectures within an overall pedagogy that
encourages active student learning). What these teaching approaches have in common is
the ideological canon that inclines learners to participate as active learners, to
participate in making judgements, and towards less reliance on the teacher as an expert.
The lecturer may be an expert in their subject area as a subject area but for a practice-
based occupation where what might be a right action is in some sense inevitably
contextual, the best the lecturer can offer might be a way of ensuring that things the
practitioner ought to take into consideration when making a decision are not neglected.
And further, if it is true as I have intimated in this thesis that students do tend to be
assessment driven then lecturers should aim to ensure that the assessments assess that
which we wish the student to demonstrate and that this includes their capacity to make
reasoned and moral judgements in clinical practice. Moreover, the assessments ought to
be such that students are encouraged to learn in ways that will help them to continue to
Ieam once they are qualified practitioners.
Competences
There is a tendency among those working in nursing education to concentrate on the
easily measurable and that this often takes the form of task competences. It may seem
odd that nursing, as a practice-based profession has felt the need to emphasise task
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