Page 278 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

Carita s cur ricul um and t e achin g -le ar ni n g
reminds me of the rhetorical and haunting question a physician asked
me during my first trip to mainland China in the late 1970s: “Why do
Americans and Canadians always ask about the parts but never about
the wholes?” Of course, his question does not apply to everyone uni-
versally, but it lingers.

parts and Wholes: the rhetorical and
haunting Questions for nursing education
This rhetorical question about parts and wholes should perhaps con-
tinue to linger in our minds. With our dominant mythologies of
knowledge, teaching, valuing, learning, and being that focus on parts
while we are challenged to work with wholes and whole human beings
and whole knowledge systems, there is an argument for wondering,
are we to remain helpless and even destructive to ourselves and to
our knowledge of human caring, healing, health, and humanity if we
fail to ask and address the other side of the epistemological mythol-
ogy? We have new questions we are ethically challenged to address,
especially for professional nursing education and Caritas curricula and
Caring pedagogy:
• How do we put the parts back into the whole?
• How do we integrate facts with meanings?
• How do we acknowledge that the personal is also the
professional?
• How do we allow our ethics to become our epistemology rather
than perpetuating epistemological myths that deform our ethics?
• How do we honor ontology-of-relationship and caring rela-
tionship as ethic, as epistemology, as pedagogy and praxis for
advancing professional nursing?
• How do we create, develop, and practice Caring Science rather
than the dominant biomedical-technological science model?
• How do we integrate, honor, and sustain humanity and rela-
tional Caritas in the midst of technological advances?
• How do we create a Caritas curriculum and Caritas Nurses for
twenty-first-century nursing and healing health care?

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