Reaching Across the Pond: Global Collaboration to Enhance Teaching and Learning

Nursing students must be prepared to provide high-quality care to patients from various socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. Nurses must be able to recognize and have an appreciation for differences. One way to ensure this appreciation develops is through the education of cultural competence (Pereira, Brisbois, Silva, & Stover, 2017). By improving cultural competence, nurses can provide patient-centered care that is based on the individuals' cultural beliefs and needs (Baernholdt, 2014). Nursing education can foster the development of cultural competence both at home and abroad. Clinical global experiences in undergraduate nursing programs have become more common in response to a more globalized world promoting cultural awareness of diverse populations in a variety of settings (Pereira et al., 2017). Global experiences depend on networks and partnerships rooted in the principles of mutuality and reciprocity (Baernholdt, 2014). By creating an engaging experience, both the guest and host programs can increase their cultural competency and prepare nurses for our global world.

Historically, nursing educational trips abroad have been primarily based on a medical-mission model; a model that conceptualizes the host country as being in need and the educational institution as offering aid. Although there have been improvements in recent years, a superior-inferior relationship is often inferred in academic global partnerships (Adams, Wagner, Nutt, & Binagwaho, 2016). In the late 1990s new models of global health emerged, challenging previous assumptions and encouraging capacity building in the host country (Rowson et al., 2012). Although the medical-mission model has been widely criticized for its lack of cultural competence and colonial undertones, a new model of global education has been slow to emerge.

One way nursing programs can develop culturally competent global experiences for students is by fostering collegial relationships among nursing faculty on a global scale. Through collaboration with host country faculty, educational expereinces can be developed to encourage an equal exchange of ideas. Visiting students are immersed in the culture of the host country and through pre-travel course meetings students learn abouth the country's food, culture, and socio-political history. Students learn about the health care system of the host country including the history and role of nursing. Nursing students from each country are enriched by exposure to nursing students and faculty from another culture.

By creating global experiences that are based in genuine respect and intellelectual curiosity, nurse faculty have the opportunity to model cultural competence and lead by example in our effort to develop nursing students as good global citizens.