‘The Problem of the Color Line’: Faculty approaches to teaching Social Justice in Baccalaureate Nursing Programs

Abstract

Social justice is put forth as a core professional nursing value, although conceptualizations within foundational documents and among nurse educators remain inconsistent and contradictory. The purpose of this study was to explore how faculty teach social justice in theory courses in Baccalaureate programs. This qualitative study utilized constructivist grounded theory methods to examine processes informing participants' teaching. Participants utilize four overarching approaches: fostering engaging classroom climates, utilizing various naming strategies, framing diversity and culture as social justice, and role modeling a critical stance. They deploy specific strategies, varying largely by race, educational background, and nursing specialty. A background in social sciences supports pedagogy that interrogates health inequities rather than merely raising awareness about disparities. Findings also reveal that faculty of color navigate institutional structures predicated upon colorblind racism and problematic views of culture, which many white faculty teaching non‐Community Health Nursing courses described doing. To enact social justice and be answerable to our communities, concerted anti‐oppression efforts are needed across education, research, practice, and policy. This includes sustained commitment to address colonialism and whiteness in every institution that defines, promotes, and claims to advance nursing so that we can fulfill our responsibility to address unjust systems and structures to serve our communities.

Moving beyond the rhetoric of social justice in nursing education

“…Furthermore, silently reproducing Eurocentric worldviews enables nurse researchers and educators to ignore the complexities that underpin and uphold systemic racism. Yet, this apolitical lens ultimately prevents the examination of root causes of inequities and undermines the very ideals of social justice that we aim to uphold (Valderama-Wallace & Apesoa-Varano, 2020). Underpinning educational endeavours with nursing's aims of social justice must therefore be inclusive of the contextual elements that influence teaching and learning.…”

“…Consistent with Chinn (2018b), students were enabled to be active participants in the grading process. Such assessment strategies and intentional democratizing of the classroom were an attempt to move beyond traditional teaching tactics toward strategies that allow students the space to demonstrate self-reflective learning and transformation (Valderama-Wallace & Apesoa-Varano, 2020).…”

“…As such, our focus in this discussion paper is to illuminate how we utilized anti-racist pedagogy to enact change in our educational practice. In particular, we discuss how we utilized Peggy Chinn's (2013) Peace and Power framework to implement classroom strategies that align with critical pedagogy to create an environment for learner transformation, while also enacting social change (Dyson, 2018;Valderama-Wallace & Apesoa-Varano, 2020).…”

Global Health in Swedish Nursing Curricula: Navigating the Desirable and the Necessary

“…Our concern is that being able to take actions should follow an interpretation based on something other than personal values and backgrounds (cf. Valderama-Wallace and Apesoa-Varano, [66,67]), also with the risk that GH content becomes 'fluid' and related to partial issues, while not being related to any social context, understanding and explanations. In our data, we found that GH, as expressed in the course syllabi, are not understood, discussed or interpreted underpinned by any explicit theoretical approach.…”

“…Among the obstacles are the background of nursing educators and their relative status within their institutions. In a study of US nursing educators' experiences teaching social justice content on undergraduate nursing programmes (Valderama-Wallace and Apesoa-Varano [67]), educators who wished to stress the issues felt isolated at their workplace and the educators' backgrounds were significant for how content was taught. Some studies have been made on race and ethnic background among nurse educators [77,78], but we were unable to find research on nurse educators' prior education with respect to sustainability studies, environmental determinants of health, personal experience of living in communities exposed to environmental hazards or prior experience working with environmental justice.…”