Global Connections: Integrating Theory and Practice in Professional Nursing: The Artinian Intersystem Model in Educational Settings

The Artinian Intersystem Model (AIM) is eminently suited to nursing education because of its focus on the two systems, teacher and student, and how they negotiate effective learning. This presentation will describe how students everywhere come to school with intrasystems consisting of their existing knowledge and understanding of life and health care, their personal values and meanings, and their resultant behaviors, and we as teachers, having our own intrasystem elements, must reach our students in ways that are meaningful and sense making to them, thus engaging in intersystem negotiation. For over 20 years, the Azusa Pacific University School of Nursing has used and continues to use the AIM to help bachelor of science in nursing students understand the theoretical underpinnings of nursing science and practice. It is used throughout the curriculum to develop critical thinking and create nursing care plans. Its use keeps the element of spiritual care foundational to the core of our curricula. The graduate nursing program presents the AIM as one of the nursing models for advanced practice nurses to explore and select for their nursing practice. At Hope Africa University (HAU) in Burundi, Central Africa, a program to prepare professional nurses at the baccalaureate and graduate levels is being developed under the direction of Dr. Darlene McCown, Director of Nursing, and is based on the AIM. At the University of Bergen, Norway, public health nursing students’ learning processes in clinical training is supported by the use of the AIM to assist supervisors in further developing their role in relation to guiding students in practice. Relationships are one key to opening or closing access to situations of learning and directly affect students’ achievement of mastering clinical competence.