Disrupting the epistemic arrangements of nursing education canon: Reflections about a prelicensure Community Engagement series

Abstract

Nursing education, as with professionalization projects, is fraught with epistemicide, false separations, and a focus on expertise over relations and accountability. This is a critical reflection of the first 5 years of a four‐semester prelicensure Community Engagement course series. As the course lead, I have consistently initiated adjustments, based on experiences teaching multiple sections and synthesizing comments and feedback from students and faculty, with an eye toward longstanding and pressing concerns in the world around us. Two broad epistemic arrangements emerge from this critical excavation: (1) naturalized hierarchy, false separations, and appraisals of relevance and (2) relationality and reflection as unsettling. There is a need for sustained collective examination and shift in how the nursing education and healthcare industries curate the meanings and practice of “community,” “health,” and “nursing,” peering out from the regulatory oversight of neoliberal forces. How might we situate student progression, program implementation, institutional contracts, and curricular standards within the contexts of nursing programs' responsibilities to local communities in light of unfolding events locally and globally and their historical antecedents? How are we all, as faculty, disrupting siloes, false separations, and the contradictions of professionalism and the biomedical model to intentionally advance health equity? May we continue to illuminate the presence of community as being everywhere, not merely in juxtaposition to acute care. May we unsettle the prevailing theorization and practices of community throughout nursing education and commit to imagining and practicing relational praxis.