Northland College’s mission is to integrate liberal arts studies with an environmental emphasis to enable those it serves to address the challenges of the future. The college values its mission as an environmental liberal arts college engaged in the pursuit of academic excellence and education that transforms the lives of its students. Northland College values the dedication of its faculty, staff, and students who together are a close-knit community that encourages each individual to grow, learn, and become an agent of positive change.

The BSN program fits Northland College’s mission. The program is designed to provide working nurses with a rigorous curriculum of nursing and liberal arts courses with an environmental focus. Student will be challenged to think critically and apply what they learn to the problems they face not only in the workplace, but the society in which they live.

Northland College’s learning community is one in which students come together in a supportive intellectual environment and feel comfortable questioning, thinking critically, and learning together. Courses are conducted in an atmosphere of caring that promotes growth of the whole person: intellectual, psychosocial, physical, moral, and spiritual.

The aim of the BSN Completion program is to educate competent and caring professional nurses who, through critical thinking and problem-solving skills, will advance the practice of nursing and be a positive influence in their communities.

Program Competencies

Students must demonstrate that they:

• Communicate effectively through writing, speaking and listening.
• Apply standards of proof—logical, quantitative, and empiric—in reasoning.
• Are familiar with the different ways of knowing—scientific, humanistic, and aesthetic—so that they can think analytically, synthetically, critically, creatively, and systemically.
• Are able to identify problems and seek effective, creative solutions to those problems by integrating knowledge and ideas from several disciplines and the world of nature.
• Evaluate their thought processes, understand their own assumptions, and practice self-reflection in order to develop a sense of inner values.
• Possess knowledge, appreciation, and respect for their own cultural heritage and traditions and those of others.
• Understand the value of diverse cultures in a global context.
• Recognize and appreciate the complexity of ecological processes, so that they may competently propose appropriate responses to environmental problems.
• Work well independently and in groups and assume leadership roles as appropriate.
• Apply formal learning to their personal and professional lives and in service to their communities.
• Practice lifelong fitness and wellness.

In addition, students graduating from BSN Completion program will demonstrate:
An understanding of the social, economic, and political influences on nursing and how nurses can use that knowledge to shape the future of nursing.
An understanding of the influence of culture on health and illness
An understanding of nursing theory and its relationship to research and practice.
An understanding of how the nursing process can be used to promote the health of individuals throughout the lifespan, families, aggregates, or communities.
The ability to use technology and information systems to promote health and facilitate communication and collaboration.
The ability to critically analyze nursing research and apply research to practice.
The ability to critically analyze ethical issues in health care.
Caring in relationships with clients and others.

Conceptual Framework for the curriculum

The mission of Northland College is to integrate liberal arts studies with an environmental emphasis. In keeping with this mission, the Northland College BSN program will challenge faculty and students to develop an ecological approach to nursing studies. By doing so, the Northland College BSN program will at the same time emphasize the roots of modern nursing and poise itself on the edge of nursing theory.

Nursing stands at the nexus of the medical sciences, the humanistic arts of caring, and the sensibilities of environmental awareness. Florence Nightingale’s great contribution to nursing, and the reason she is recognized as the founder of the modern discipline, is her establishment, through modern statistical analysis and new means of statistical presentation created by her, of the interconnectedness between the environment and human health. There is a striking similarity in Nightingale’s comments on rural sanitation and Sigurd F.Olson, the great environmentalist’s, reflections on the ecological crisis:

So, as we read such an account as this, we seem to be watching…murder going on, and to be waiting for the rates of mortality to go up before we interfere; we wait to see whether the filth will really trickle into the well, and whether the foul water really will poison the family, and how many will die of it. And then, when enough have died, we think it time to spend some money and some trouble to stop the murders going further, and we enter the results of our “masterly inactivity” neatly in tables; but we do not analyze and tabulate the saddened lives of those who remain, and the desolate homes in our “sanitary” districts. (Nightingale, 1954).

And now after four hundred years we are faced with an ecologic crisis which threatens our survival. Waters once dear have become sewers, are poisoned with noxious waste, soil impregnated with harmful chemicals, the surface of the land befouled with garbage and the enormous effects of civilization… We believe that science has all the answers and that there is nothing we cannot do. (Olson, 1998).

Nightingale’s environmental views have become part of the daily practice of nursing. But some authors, citing the ascendancy of biomedical, mechanical, and holistic nursing theories, have suggested that a more explicit recognition of an ecological conceptual basis for nursing is called for. (Van Sell, 2002 and Shaver, 2000). By virtue of its environmental mission, Northland College is uniquely suited to this task.

Northland College is committed to academic rigor and intellectual integrity. As such nursing students will not be asked to accept any particular view of nursing on faith.
Nursing is an emerging discipline with a rapidly growing body of knowledge. Nurses debate the definition of nursing. Students will study definitions of nursing including those of Nightingale; Henderson; Rogers; Watson; Schlotfeldt; and Newman, Sime, and Corcoran-Perry and will be challenged to write their own definitions of nursing.

Nursing also debates the conceptual framework for nursing. Our ecological framework is consistent with the specific characteristics or phenomena of interest grouped by Donaldson and Crowley (1978) into three themes:

Concern with principles and laws that govern the processes, well-being, and optimum functioning of human beings, sick or well.
Concern with the patterning of human behavior in interaction with the environment in critical life situations.
Concern with the processes by which positive changes in health status are affected.

In the course of the Northland College BSN program students will explore the above phenomena as well as the major concepts incorporated in most conceptual frameworks for nursing: person, environment, nursing, and health. Students will identify their own values, beliefs, and assumptions about those concepts. They will develop their own definitions of those concepts as well as the concept of caring. Students will analyze the conceptual frameworks that have been proposed by various nurse theorists.

In addition nursing education at Northland will be guided by Barbara Carper’s four patterns of knowing.

Carper (1978) identified four patterns of knowing in nursing. Those patterns are: empirics, the science of nursing; esthetics, the art of nursing; the component of personal knowledge; and ethics, the moral component. It is the goal of the Northland College nursing program that students will learn in all four patterns of knowing.

The empirical pattern of knowing focuses on the factual, the science of nursing. In that realm students will learn to critically analyze nursing research and the effects of culture and environment on health and illness. Using the ethical pattern of knowing, students will learn to analyze ethical dilemmas in nursing. The esthetics or art of nursing emphasizes the caring in nursing. Esthetics involves the knowing of a unique individual, the empathy or capacity for participating in another’s feelings, and the caring actions taken to help that individual. Students will learn the importance of caring and analyze components of caring in nursing practice. The concept of “listening” central to Sigurd Olson’s conception of environmental appreciation (as well as self-knowledge) will be explored. (1997a, 1997b). The component of personal knowledge involves self- knowledge and self-actualization. Students, through questioning previously held beliefs, will be challenged to learn and grow as human beings.

References

1. Carper, B.A. (1978). Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, 1(1), 13-23.
2. Donaldson, S.K. & Crowley, D.M. (1978). The discipline of nursing. Nursing Outlook, 26(2), 113-120.
3. Nightingale, Florence (1954). Selected writings of Florence Nightingale, ed. Lucy Ridgely Seymer. New York: MacMillan.
4. Olson, Sigurd (1997a). The singing wilderness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5. Olson, Sigurd (1997b). The listening point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
6. Shaver, J. (2000). Evidence based nursing and midwifery research. Proceedings of the Bangkok International Conference on Health Research for Development (World Health Organization, World Bank, Global Forum for Health Research, and Council on health Research for Development).
7. Van Sell, S.L. et.al. (2002). Nursing paradigms: Receding, existing, and emerging.
   ICUs and Nursing Web Journal, 9th issue. Retrieved March 1, 2004 from http://www.nursing.gr.

Contact Information

Kate Siegler, RN, MSN
Director of Nursing
Email: ksiegler@northland.edu
Phone: (715) 682-1233