Description/Overview: A core aspect to nurses’ practice and identity is the concern for vulnerable individuals, families and communities. Nursing’s place within contemporary health care systems is based not only on facilitating medical treatment and cure, but on enabling individuals and strengthening communities. Contemporary nursing education needs to respond to the imperatives facing clinical practice – that nurses be work-ready, resilient, multi-skilled, good team communicators, compassionate and responsive to the diverse needs of clients. Transformative learning (TL) principles combined with effective, action-based learning experiences can provide a focused pedagogical basis for cultivating and achieving these graduate outcomes. The epistemology underpinning TL is that society remains unequal, divided along many lines (Mezirow, 2000). Transforming the social agenda requires a commitment to review social injustice and change the status quo. As many people who are vulnerable by virtue of poverty, social circumstance, ethnicity, gender, or illness attest, it is not just extreme events that silence or oppress them. For them, inequality is experienced in everyday activities, experiences that are seemingly so mundane that they have become taken-for-granted and overlooked. For critical theorists and transformative learning advocates, it is in these personal practices where power is used, and where change can and should occur. This symposium will bring together experts in Transformative Learning, Leadership, Research and Practice to explore the significance and success of innovations aiming to equip nurses with the skills to work knowingly in health care contexts, so that they are assisting society to move forward towards equality, access and freedom for all. Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as transformation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Learner Objective #1: Identify collaborative partners so that the change agenda in nursing globally is further disseminated and developed

Learner Objective #2: Appreciate that while there are similarities in transformative approaches, there are differences in methods as a result of the uniqueness in each culture