The College of Nursing’s mission is to educate generalists and specialists in nursing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate and graduate curricula exist within a university community that embraces a student body enriched by cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity where religious and ethical commitment and academic freedom are valued. The college aims to cultivate values in its students and graduates that enable a commitment to lifelong learning, service and leadership for the greater good of the global society.
The undergraduate philosophy of education views education as a dynamic process that directs and facilitates learning. Learning is the active, continuous process of acquiring knowledge and skill that brings about actual or potential changes in behavior. Learning is a lifelong endeavor. New learning builds on previous levels of knowledge and experience and is a function of motivation and readiness. The faculty guide, direct, facilitate, and evaluate learning while encouraging self-direction and development of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and independent thinking. The development of cognitive skills that include critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis is a vital process necessary for professional nursing practice.
Bernard Lonergan’s Generalized Empirical Method can enhance the education of baccalaureate nursing education. According to Lonergan human beings have a desire to know. Inquiry is the process of coming to an understanding. Each person’s inquiries are operating within a normative dynamic cognitive structure. Our inquiring is a creative process that has the potential to transform us, our world, and life. The connection between inquiry and action, between knowing and doing are how Lonergan frames this quest to understand inquiry. Inquiry depends on the extent to which each inquirer enacts the behavioral percepts. The precepts correspond to the four cognitive operations. The precepts name behaviors, habits of the mind that allow us to transcend our current knowledge limits, and expand our horizons for knowledge development.
According to Lonergan faith and progress have a common root in man’s cognitional and moral self-transcendence. To promote either is to promote the other indirectly. Faith reveals an ultimate significance in human achievement since it strengthens new undertakings with confidence. Inversely, progress realizes the potential of man and nature, it reveals that man exists to bring about an ever fuller achievement in the world and that achievement because it is man’s good also is God’s glory. Faith has the power of undoing decline. Decline disrupts a culture with conflicting ideologies. It inflicts on individuals the social, economic, and psychological pressures. Religious faith liberates human reasonableness.
According to Doran authenticity is achieved in self-transcendence, and consistent self-transcendence is reached only by conversion. What makes a person an authentic human being is that they are consistently self-transcending and consistent self-transcendence requires that one undergo a multiple and ongoing process of conversion. Conversion entails a radical shift in one’s horizon, an “about face.” All disciplines and professions have different horizons but they can be complementary horizons. Students in the nursing programs go through this process as they continue through the curriculum and develop their philosophy of nursing which enhances the role of the professional nurse that they aspire to become.
In nursing education these principles are consistently changing in the delivery of health care. For example, the focus of inter-professional education involves working within a team approach with physicians, therapists, pharmacist, and social services. Professional nursing education has a rich history which will withstand the test of time and enhance the focus of health care with the best positive outcomes for society.