Elsevier

Nurse Education Today

Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 100-103
Nurse Education Today

The ‘sustainability lens’: A framework for nurse education that is ‘fit for the future’

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2013.02.010Get rights and content

Summary

In this paper we describe and justify a framework for curriculum development that uses the concept of a sustainability lens. This is based on an understanding that we construct our social worlds and create a reality based upon what Gadamer (1977) called ‘prejudices’. The social world of nurse education has its own prejudices, referred to by Scrimshaw (1983) as ‘ideologies’. These form often taken for granted assumptions and values about what education is. The framework bases itself on how sustainability conceptualises health, and 4 approaches to health care delivery, along two continua of individual–society and illness–wellbeing. Further, we argue that in response to a wider education for sustainability agenda, nurse educators could develop their own sustainability lens and bring it to bear on this framework to interpret professional standards in a new way.

Introduction

This paper outlines a framework for curriculum development which addresses the need for producing nurse graduates who are sustainability literate (Stibbe, 2009) and ‘fit for the future’ (NHSSDU, 2009), one in which the health and security impacts of climate change may be quite severe (Costello et al., 2009, British Medical Journal, 2011). The justification for addressing sustainability and climate change in nurse education has been argued elsewhere (Goodman and Richardson, 2010, Goodman, 2011, Barna et al., 2012), the focus here is on understanding how a curricula gets created based on particular interpretations of nurse education which may not currently be informed by sustainability concepts. This understanding of curriculum development is based on Gadamer's concept of ‘prejudice’, Scrimshaw's notion of educational ideologies and the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). The framework itself links different approaches to health care delivery to the construction of our own ‘lens’, or a new ‘prejudice’ to inform curriculum development.

Section snippets

Curriculum Development, and the Social Construction of Reality Using an Interpretive ‘Lens’

When developing a curriculum we engage in constructing a social world using a world view, often based on assumed educational ideologies (Scrimshaw, 1983), which shapes the terms of any debate over such issues as learning outcomes and pedagogy. Scrimshaw refers to ideologies as sets of values and beliefs, which we take to mean a set of presuppositions, ideas and concepts that shape how we see the world. It is this ‘seeing’ the world that leads to the metaphor of the lens. We therefore mean the

Developing a Sustainability Lens

The background to educators developing their sustainability lens crosses several decades. During the 1980s the United Nations General Assembly established the Bruntland Commission which published (1987), a report: ‘Our Common Future’. This was a global initiative to unite countries around sustainability principles. This is not the definitive start by any means of a sustainability paradigm, it does however provide a starting point for anyone wishing to develop sustainability (or eco) literacy.

Curriculum Development

The curriculum has been described as a ‘battleground of competing ideologies’ (Kelly, 1999, p. 19). As we have noted, Scrimshaw (1983) described at least four educational ideologies which have been implicated in this battle:

  • 1.

    Liberal humanism — education is a ‘good’ in itself.

  • 2.

    Instrumentalism — education is for a purpose, a job.

  • 3.

    Progressivism — education is for personal growth and development.

  • 4.

    Social reconstructivism — education is for social change.

These are the background often uncontested and/or

Conclusion

If we understand that curricula arise out of our prejudices, informed by assumed ideologies which then construct a particular social world of nurse education, we may realise that current education practice will reflect what is seen by the majority as good and proper concepts and topic areas. Currently this good and proper place is rooted in biomedical approaches to health, flavoured by the biopsycho-social approach. This sits upon a need to produce a workforce for health care delivery in an

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