New psych nursing curriculum reflects

changing needs, workplace

ouglas College’s Psychiatric
Nursing Department has
developed a new curriculum that

reflects a changing workplace for
psychiatric nurses, says instructor Jeanette
Mossing.

“The workplace is becoming much
more acute, and there’s no such thing as
an easy place to work. Students need
more skills and more knowledge, and you
can’t give them that just by increasing
content -- you have to change teaching
strategies and improve curriculum. There
is a paradigm shift in all of nursing
education, and our program has responded
to it.”

The need for changes to the program
arose from accelerating changes in
society’s demographics, economic
realities, reorganization of the health care
system and the move to community care.

About 35 students began study in the
new curriculum this fall. The new

College’s Portfolio Pilot Project

curriculum emphasizes learning activities
that encourage flexibility, creativity,
critical thinking, self-affirmation and self-
discovery. Students are actively engaged
in collaborative learning processes which
facilitate student-student and student-
teacher interactions to enable learning to
take place.

Theoretical concepts related to practice
enable students to generalize their
learning and build a strong foundation for
psychiatric nursing practice.

Graduates of the Psychiatric Nursing
Department’s diploma and advanced
diploma programs work in a variety of
settings including acute psychiatric, child
and adolescent, forensic, substance abuse,
physically and developmentally
challenged, and palliative care.

For staff, faculty and students who
want to know more about Psychiatric
Nursing and the new curriculum, an Open
House will be held on Thursday,

featured at conference

Magazine, the American

Association of Higher Education’s
respected review of higher learning, editor
Ted Marchese talks about “getting smarter
about teaching”. He describes his
impressions of an AAHE conference in
Vancouver this summer on improving
teaching through reflective practice.
Marchese notes that the 150 Canadian and
U.S. participants were “veteran faculty,
talented at their craft yet ready to ask more
of themselves on behalf of higher
learning”. Various Douglas College
faculty attended. Marchese writes that
“teaching and learning are inseparable -
like inhaling and exhaling, as one conferee
put it”.

All sound familiar? It should,
especially to College faculty who joined
the Portfolio Pilot Project in September
1993. The same exercises they did back

L the latest issue of Change

then were introduced at this summer’s
conference by Gillies Malnarich, who
presented the educational purposes and
philosophical underpinnings of Douglas
College’s project. Malnarich worked with
AAHE executive director Patricia
Hutchings on sessions designed to
encourage the use of teaching portfolios
as a means to prompt reflective practice
and teaching excellence.

At Douglas College, some faculty met
last month to discuss the Portfolio Pilot
Project’s next phase. As a first step,
anyone who participated in the pilot
project will be asked to evaluate the
project in light of its original objectives.
Given the many requests from people
inside and outside the College to organize
another project, plans are under way to
host a two-day summer institute based on
the ‘best practices’ of the two-year
project. I

November 23 from 3pm to 6pm in the
Theatre Foyer on the Fourth Floor.

There will be program and degree
information, the program philosophy,
details on the new curriculum, and student
work to demonstrate what they do in their
programs.

“Psychiatric nursing is very
specialized, and we’d like people to come
and find out what psych nurses do,” says
Mossing.

Since 1992, the program’s curriculum
development has required that each
faculty member use their designated yearly
curriculum development time while
creatively managing their current
workloads while participating in
Department workshops, regular
curriculum meetings and small task
groups. The faculty commitment will
continue until the completion of the
implementation phase in April, 1998, with
the graduation of the first class.

For more information, call Ray
Fournier at 527-5018. 1

Quote of the Month:

"Canada is a country whose
major problems are never
solved."

- A.R.M. Lower, historian
1975