This paper describes the discourses underlying nursing teachers' talk about their own norm-critical competence. Norm criticism is an approach that promotes awareness and criticism of the norms and power structures that exert an excluding effect in society in general and in the healthcare encounter in particular. Given the unequal relationships that can exist in healthcare, for example relationships shaped by racism, sexism and classism, a norm-critical approach to nursing education would help illuminate these matters. The studied empirical material consisted of focus group interviews. Nursing teachers discussed their norm-critical competence based on the university course "Norm-Aware Caring" in which they had recently participated. Through a critical discourse analysis, three discourses were identified in their talk, all of which had the potential to disrupt traditional, normative nursing education. However, in all three discourses there was an underlying discourse of normality, clearly positioning the teachers as exemplifying the "normal." The binary constructed between normality and otherness contradicts a basic tenet of the norm-critical approach and may hamper the development of genuine norm-critical competence in nursing education.

Education is important in shaping professional identity, including how one approaches norms and normalisation. In the analysis presented in this study, nursing students' own constructions of norms and normality from the outlook of their education are highlighted and problematised. To deepen the understanding of these matters, the aim of this study was to explore constructions of norms and normality among students in nursing education. Students studying in a nursing department at a Swedish university college were approached and asked to consider open survey questions targeting their views on norms and normality; 154 of them replied. After a discourse analytic approach to the data, we could see how the students constructed norms and normality as (a) instrumental instructions, consisting of easy‐to‐digest statements grounded in the profession's obvious moral and ethical values, (b) limiting and frustrating obstacles for personal freedom that were important to challenge, (c) rules to be obeyed for the stability of society and (d) a matter of reflection, with each individual being responsible for understanding differences in norms, perspectives and opinions. We conclude that nursing education would benefit from norm‐critical perspectives, problematising students' own positions to norms, power and privilege.

The documents and literature that regulate nursing education are based on certain values and knowledge, and the underlying power in the curriculum raises the question of how health care professionals are molded during the course of their education. Norm criticism is a concept with its roots in critical pedagogy and gender and queer studies, emphasizing the origins as well as the consequences of marginalization, power, and knowledge of what is generally accepted as “normal” and “true.” Norm criticism is used in this article to analyze the documents and literature underlying a nursing program in Sweden, which are shown to include a sometimes politically correct rhetoric, but one lacking a firm basis in social justice values.