Over the last several years, there has been a growing awareness of a need for better integration of the liberal arts into
nursing curricula. To facilitate this process, the authors describe a creative teaching strategy and offer
specific suggestions for the selection and use of novels, short stories, plays, and poems to supplement the teaching of specific nursing content.
The traditional testing process often is static and intimidating to students and encourages multiple guessing or rote recall of information, Just before graduating, nursing students read Bed Number 10, a reflective account of an author''s experience of being hospitalized with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which left every muscle in her body paralyzed. Students'' wrote about the meaning of the story to their practice. The findings are heartwarming and remind us why we chose nursing. They also lead one to believe that caring for critically ill patients can be taught, in part, by reading a novel.
Finally we report one innovative teaching strategy that is a result of the development and implementation of a community-based, interdisciplinary curricular model for health professionals. This model program brought together the disciplines of medicine, nursing, and public health in a community setting. Finding methods to incorporate communities more in the educational process of health professionals is a challenge. The scavenger hunt became one useful avenue to meet several course outcomes within the interdisciplinary curriculum.
To emphasize an up-to-the-minute
management focus, highlight current issues facing nurse managers, and expose students to the value of reading professional nursing journals, the required readings for a baccalaureate nursing management class were changed from the traditional textbook to a package of 12 concurrent issues of a current nursing management journal. The goals of the course, the advantages and disadvantages of the change to journals, and recommendations regarding the exclusive use of a specific journal are described.