Page 274 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

Carita s cur ricul um and t e achin g -le ar ni n g
with current and futuristic pedagogies directed toward transforma-
tive teaching and learning. Previous works in nursing education that
underpin this perspective are integrated into a contemporary frame-
work that offers both a moral and a scientific model for considering
caring as an ethic, an ontology, an epistemic and praxis endeavor, as
well as an educational/pedagogical challenge.

To take love seriously
and to bear and to learn it like a task,
this is what people need.
For one human being to love another,
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work
is but a preparation.
rainer maria rilke
One of the greatest disappointments in modern times has been an
exclusive focus on the head and the mind, on rational, cognitive think-
ing as the basis for teaching-learning, almost to the exclusion of the
heart and emotions. As a caring profession, where are we to learn the
ultimate, the last test and proof of the work of humanity with which
we deal: Human Caring/Caritas/Love?
Within a critique of knowledge and education, curriculum and
learning, we have a new awareness, an awakening to the fact that every
epistemology becomes an ethic (Palmer 2004). A fundamental con-
flict has prevailed within our institutions of higher learning that has
already caught up with us in the Western world of science and pro-
fessionalism. Everything has consequences. The types and ways of
teaching and learning that have prevailed at the cognitive, intellectual,
rational level alone are formative to our human development; they are
shaping the lives of human beings and forming, informing, or deform-
ing our mind-sets and actions as people and as professionals.
As Palmer (2004:2) profoundly asked, “What ethical formation and
deformation has this approach to education created in our lives?” sug-
gesting overtly a relationship between our knowledge and violence:
the violence of knowledge (and language of power, control, domina-

246