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There is little debate among those who have dedicated their careers to building the science of nursing education on two key issues:
The evidence base upon which nurse educators rely to plan, deliver, administer, and evaluate all levels of academic nursing education programs is in urgent need of both expansion and improvement in the quality and rigor of studies contributing to the evidence base.
One of the most fundamental challenges to building the science of nursing education is the limited respect that research in nursing education receives from within the academic nursing education community, particularly in the United States.
These and other ideas were summarized recently by Oermann and Kardong-Edgren (2018) in their editorial response to changes that are unfolding within PhD in nursing programs in the United States. In brief, these changes include adjusting the PhD in nursing program curricula to more strongly prepare nurse scientists to conduct research in areas such as genomics, biobehavioral interventions, team science, and big data. While discussions of the challenges facing nursing education researchers have tended to focus primarily on the lack of funding for nursing education research—and to be clear, this is a significant issue—perhaps what should be of more concern is the increasingly narrow (and often self-reinforcing) view of what constitutes nursing practice and, consequently, nursing science.
Definitions of nursing practice that either actively exclude or simply fail to include the practice of nursing education both set the stage for and reinforce beliefs about how research in nursing education should be valued within the academy and, consequently, by the funders of research conducted within the profession. In a recent white paper on the preferred vision for academic nursing, while clearly recognizing the need for nursing faculty to possess knowledge and skills in a wide range of areas related to teaching and learning practices in the faculty role,...