Acknowledgments
I worked for years on this book, but not until I worked with Vicki Bobo did I have a plan to finish. Her support and reading guidance has been the internal and external support I needed to finish this project.
I am also greatly indebted to leaders in education that have been breaking traditional educational methods and asking for a new generation of teachers. Parker Palmer, a great author and educator, has inspired me in many ways to challenge the objectivist movement as I look to integrate affective methods into the classroom. In addition, Marie Manthey and her team at Creative Health Care Management are an inspiration to us and our need to continue efforts to build relational and caring practices as nurses. It is not enough to be competent nurses, but to be passionate about how we connect to others for their best healing.
Another great educator is Jean Watson, who lives daily to change the practice of nursing to a place of presence and care. If we could just be in such a place as we meet our patients each day, we would have our inner healer moving out to all those we touch.
I also want to thank my wife, Terri, who had more sleepless nights arising from my dissertation period than from the writing of this text. However, I have had to take so much from We Time to be just Me Time and I am thankful for such a partner in my life.
I The Problem in Nursing Education
Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible. (Palmer, 2007, p. 27)
What Is Affective Pedagogy: What Is the Risk for Faculty?
POSSIBILITIES
As a reader of this text, walk around your college or university, visit a classroom, and look closely at the students and the teacher within. Sit for a minute in the back of the room. Challenge your self to ignore the topic of the class, and observe only the connections that are present or absent among participants in the classroom. Don't be critical of anyone, but observe what is there. This is the reality of that particular class culture and what has been created consciously or unconsciously. You may or may not like what you see.
The reality is that faculty come to teaching for different reasons. Many are called to teaching as their passion, vocation, or expression of their inner selves. Others find teaching by mistake or perhaps through a confused belief that teaching is their calling. What a sad revelation it is when all a teacher can see are students who are floundering, expressing misguided thinking, or appearing inattentive and lazy. Imagine the possibilities if more faculty knew they were in the right career and their primary goal was to create a connection between themselves and their students, which worked like an umbilical cord for cognitive and affective development.
More typically, life as a nurse educator, teacher, and mentor means daily excitement as nursing students move toward independence and begin to show a connection of caring with their patients. Eventually, graduates take on therole of becoming a professional nurse. It is exciting to see these same students years later as they mentor new students in clinical practice. The journey is not always pleasant, friendly, or without hazards. So applaud yourself for taking the risk of becoming an educator of nurses.
What is even more worthy of recognition is a willingness to address the lost pedagogy—the affective domain. Utilizing the affective domain as pedagogy is a form of teaching that engages students in such a way that it impacts their knowledge of self, how they value or believe certain things, and it assists them in understanding the choices they make and actions they take. This approach to education transforms the student. Affective teaching has either been a mystery of meaning, or utilizing the affective domain has been too confusing for educators to incorporate into teaching practice. Nurses need a level of self-awareness to truly connect with their patients during the healing process as well as to understand their therapeutic selves. Affective teaching methods are at the core of bringing this understanding to light, and it is time to know more about what this means. This will entitle you to more than a simple acknowledgment as a teacher. It will deserve a heart-felt “thank you” for being willing to do the difficult personal work of taking a journey beyond tradition, routine, and habit to become an affective-literate teacher.
