"They bring the topic [of social justice] but stop there": Nursing students' perceptions of teaching practices that develop awareness and engagement with social justice

Abstract

Background: Pedagogical frameworks grounded in social justice, such as decolonizing and anti-racist educational practices, are essential in nursing programs. While scholars have begun to examine nurse educators' conceptualizations of social justice, there remains a lack of knowledge about student perspectives regarding nurse educators' approaches to incorporating social justice in education.

Objective: To understand nursing students' perceptions about educational strategies that develop critical awareness and engagement with social justice and positively influence professional practice.

Design: A qualitative study informed by Critical Feminist Pedagogy and guided by Interpretive Description methodology.

Settings: A school of nursing in Western Canada.

Participants: Ten undergraduate and graduate nursing students recruited through convenience sampling.

Methods: Students participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews. A set of questions developed to facilitate data analysis allowed the deconstruction of the data to identify broad-based inductive categories. Contrast and comparison methods were also used. Members of the research team provided analytic insights into the categories, and subsequently, all members discussed the findings and developed the interpretive frame.

Results: Student participants reported that educational strategies promoting awareness and engagement with social justice need to go beyond superficial engagement and awareness of social justice. Researchers' analysis suggests that cohesiveness between awareness and action in social justice is urgently needed within academia to adopt a decolonizing and anti-racist pedagogy in nursing and better prepare students for professional practice. From the data analysis, teaching strategies that enhance cohesiveness include: embracing personal development, creating community spaces and disrupting knowledge and curriculum hierarchies.

Conclusions: Understanding students' perceptions and incorporating their suggestions is critical to integrating socially just teaching practices that embrace a learner-centred pedagogy. Our findings offer suggestions for teaching strategies that foster critical awareness and engagement with social justice. Combined, these contribute to our understanding of signature pedagogies in nursing with the intention of increasing the adoption of anti-racist and decolonizing approaches.

Keywords: Antiracism; Decolonizing approaches; Nurse educators; Nursing education; Nursing students; Social justice; Teaching.