Internationally, student nurse education has changed remarkably over the last fifty years, transforming itself from an apprenticeship based, service driven model towards an all graduate profession. As a nursing educator, aiming to contribute to the professional identity formation and knowledge development of student nurses, I am positioned in this changing landscape. The traditional reliance in nurse education on vocational training pedagogies and performance outcome strategies is being challenged as we scrutinise instruction models of conventional pedagogy and explore alternative interpretive pedagogies such as critical, feminist, phenomenological, and postmodern approaches (Diekelmann, 2001). In contemporary nursing, teachers and nursing students alike operate in a context where these alternative approaches to nursing pedagogy rub up against traditional perspectives and practices. Koithan (1996, p. 535) asserts that "the profession requires an awareness and multiple methodological strategies for an educational system that models creativity and thinking rather than conformity and performance." Nurses encounter situations every day that are emotionally, ethically and cognitively complex. There are no textbook answers and nurses call on past experiences, knowledge, intuition and critical reflection to respond in the moment in these encounters (Benner, 1984). Knowledge and acts of nursing/meaning are created between people engaged in health/care interactions in dynamic and unsignalled ways (Watson, 1988; Peplau, 1998). This complexity of integration and inter-relation has few reference points in positivistic domains; nursing educators argue that, while scientific and positivistic inquiry are recognised and valued as a means of generating some aspects of nursing knowledge, the domination of nursing and midwifery curricula by scientific rationality has meant that the intuitive and relational aspects of nursing work and knowledge have been marginalized (Jackson & Sullivan, 1999). Further, an emphasis on outcomes and the observable may "inadvertently obscure the uncertainty within and complexity of nursing practice, as well as the multifaceted problems facing nurses and clients on a daily basis" (Ironside, 2003, p. 515). Schön (1983, p. 49) claims that professionals need "an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict". © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
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