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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Nursing educators have a responsibility to prepare nursing students to meet the challenges of a dynamic health care delivery system. It is a professional imperative that nursing students are taught to develop, optimize, and maintain interdisciplinary partnerships within the health care system as well as within the communities that are served. It is equally important that they are taught to respond to health issues and deficits that are identified by their communities, rather than rely solely on objective assessments. This is a service learning project that introduced pediatric nursing students to the theory and practice of addressing community-identified needs of youth in selected elementary and middle schools in a circumscribed mid-western metropolitan area. Nursing college faculty members established a working partnership with the local chapter of the American Red Cross (ARC).
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An Experiential Learning Tool
Service learning is a pedagogy that provides for structured learning experiences in the academic arena, combining community service with experiential learning objects (Seifer, 1998). Its implementation has been exercised in a growing number of educational programs across the nation, most recently in the annals of nursing academia (O'Neil & Coffman, 1998). Nursing professionals have expressed an interest and an excitement in the potential that service learning has for broadening the knowledge and practice bases of professional nursing education. Well planned service learning activities have been shown to enhance the relevance of the services that are provided by health care professionals and increase the students' awareness of civic responsibility (Norbeck, Connolly, & Koerner, 1998).
A form of experiential education, service learning encourages nursing students to engage in activities that stimulate critical thinking while attending to health issues identified by a specific community. The nursing students are guided in interactions that emphasize the reciprocity of interdependent alliances. Written reflections and small group dialogue augment their experience. Integral to the basic concept is the initiation of meaningful community partnerships (Jacoby & Associates, 1996). Such alliances pave the way for the development of respect and understanding between agency and academia, between professional health care providers and the communities that they serve.
Service learning is an innovative approach to teaching that is currently capturing the attention of nurse educators. Its greatest potential lies in the development of unique student clinical experiences that complement...
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