Objectives have been used for decades in nursing education to set the stage for what is expected of students and to guide faculty in planning teaching and assessment. However, nursing education is evolving and the timeworn practices used to write objectives must evolve as well. This chapter focuses on how to write broad behavioral objectives to support learning in a constructivist, learner-centered online environment to guide teaching and learning that are in step with today’s innovations in education and that follow the call for radical transformation in nursing education. Objectives focused on the desired learning outcomes or intended behavior changes, termed performance. The psychomotor domain is the skills domain in the narrow sense of the word, in that this domain provides a means of identifying outcomes that involve fine, manual, and gross motor movements.

This chapter explains the seminal Institute of Medicine (IOM) report: The Future of Nursing (FoN): Leading Change, Advancing Health and the background organizations that wrote it. It demonstrates some key recommendations of FoN: Leading Change, Advancing Health report and its “fit” with Indian Country. The chapter differentiates between challenges in obtaining nursing education in Indian Country and those in dominant culture settings. The IOM’s effort with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) on the FoN has been noticed by many, yet direct care nurses are largely unaware of the report. The chapter outlines the FoN recommendations into two groups: gaining education, practicing to its fullest scope, and pushing for more, including lifelong learning; and shaping policy, being at the table as full partners in health care redesign, and leading change. For American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) nurses graduating from tribal colleges and universities (TCU), the majority will have an associate’s degree.

This chapter presents some of the educational strategies and implications of integrative teaching and learning. It describes two major types of integrative strategies that follow the logic of practice. First, multiple examples of how to coach situated learning in actual practice that have proven successful in developing embodied knowledge and skillful, intelligent performance, are detailed. Second, a Thinking-In-Action approach to integrating classroom with clinical teaching exemplifies how to teach learners to use extensive scientific, technological, and theoretical knowledge in the context of an unfolding patient situation that changes over time, while imaginatively responding to the patient’s multiple needs and other demands in the situation. In order to be effective clinicians, the student and developing nurse must progress to grasping the nature of whole clinical situations, developing an experience-based sense of salience and using multiple frames of reference that encompass patient and family-focused care.

This chapter presents firsthand accounts from Kim Larson at all professional levels, who share her life-changing experiences and insights with nurses interested in the global health arena. Written with compassion and humor, her story emphasizes the practical, challenging, and rewarding aspects of global health nursing. Kim describes how she weaves her global interests into her academic life both at home and abroad. She provides creative approaches to offering global experiences to her nursing students. Nursing education needs to establish mentoring programs that develop faculty in global health nursing. Like other researchers, Kim and her junior recommend widespread application of community-based participatory research (CBPR) when working with the Latino community. She had found the Latino community in Guatemala and North Carolina to be engaged and invested in their respective futures. Kim hopes to continue to participate in improving the health of Latino families and communities for years to come.

This chapter describes a multidimensional strategy for teaching and learning cultural competence in graduate nursing education with a focus on the innovative field trip experience (IFTE). An overview of the literature in nursing and higher education provides the essential background information underlying strategy development, implementation, and evaluation, including a discussion of how the cultural competence and confidence (CCC) model guided development. The chapter highlights an overview of the transcultural nursing core course within the clinical nurse specialist (CNS) curriculum. Transcultural self-efficacy (TSE) is the perceived confidence for performing or learning general transcultural nursing skills among culturally different patients. The chapter shows actual case exemplars to demonstrate application of the IFTE and to present select highlights of the learning experience from the student perspective. Students were motivated to share their IFTE and further develop their professional roles beyond the course via publication, presentations, and networking.

During the past several years, simulation pedagogy has taken off in leaps and bounds. The breadth of simulation design and implementation has become woven into the fabric of the majority of nursing education in the United States and beyond. As faculty members who teach in both graduate and undergraduate courses, the authors of this chapter find that simulation can be challenging to both the novice and seasoned educator. This chapter focuses on the use of simulation in the fundamental physical assessment course. The use of simulation technology is especially useful in creating the equivalent of “muscle memory” for the students because of the ability to do frequent and repetitive exercises using this technology. It is especially useful in assisting students to learn, develop, and mature their assessment skills. The chapter briefly describes specific objectives for simulation usage within a specific course and the overall program.

Cultural competency is considered an important skill for nurses and will aid in the elimination of health disparities, with the goal of increased quality of care and improved patient outcomes. Cultural competence is a contemporary issue in health care today and educators are seeking the best practice for teaching cultural competence in nursing education. This chapter discusses the problem and significance of cultural competence training for nursing students. Cultural immersion, or an experience of living among a culture different from one’s own, is a method of teaching cultural competence that appeal to the current generation of college students. To achieve patient-centered care, the chapter addresses the fact that American society, and the larger global society, is increasingly diverse in areas such as race, ethnicity, language, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This diversity creates cultural gaps that must be bridged in order to provide quality health care.

For graduate nurses and advanced practice nurses, the use of simulation is generally limited to acquiring various clinical skills or clinical management scenarios. Simulation is being used in the health care field to promote team training and nontechnical skills such as teamwork, communication, collaboration, and leadership. Recognizing the preference for simulation training by students and the reported increased learning and confidence in clinical skills, this chapter attempts to expand the use of simulation beyond clinical and teamwork skills into the management and administrative courses of graduate nursing education. Although incorporating simulation into the root cause analysis (RCA) process and error identification is increasing, its use in undergraduate and graduate nursing education is still limited. This chapter discusses the implementation of a hybrid simulation program for nonclinical skills, which was implemented in a graduate nursing class focused on quality, safety, and process improvement.

This chapter reviews some of the most common problems confronted by nurses working in conflict zones. Nurses and other health care workers who enter a conflict area to retrieve the wounded should be allowed to pass without threats to their safety. Armed conflict leads to increased rates of gender-based violence and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV infection. In times of conflict, children are vulnerable to malnutrition, which then lowers resistance to common public health problems such as malaria, measles, and respiratory infections such as pneumonia. Mental health is adversely affected by violent conflict, and has only recently begun to be addressed by humanitarian relief agencies. Prolonged armed conflict can have devastating effects on the discipline of nursing and on nursing education. Many resources, including training programs, online information, and input from experienced staff, are available for nurses who wish to contribute to global health nursing in conflict areas.

This chapter describes an innovative philosophical approach and learning activities for integrating general transcultural nursing concepts and skills within a first semester introductory nursing course. Cultural competence in nursing education is receiving renewed emphasis. It is linked increasingly to reducing health care disparities among racial, ethnic, uninsured, and underserved U.S. populations. Madeleine Leininger’s transcultural care model offers nurse educators a conceptual framework from which to guide transcultural nursing practice, research, and education. Several institutional review board (IRB)-approved research studies evaluating the program’s effectiveness indicated that the library orientation program was helpful, and that students became more skilled in utilizing the resources of the library for cultural research, and in writing a literature-supported research paper. Collaboration between faculty, students, and librarian often occurred during the literature search and review, because many students were inexperienced in writing a literature-supported paper.