Page 279 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

C ar it as cu rr icu lu m a n d t ea c h i n g-l ea r n i n g
addressing the rhetorical educational
Questions and issues for the tWenty-first century
Today, we are facing these critical questions about the consequences
of our teaching-learning models. There is a worldwide search for
more than status quo approaches to education and knowing, whereby
there are also efforts to avoid the divided self mind-set with its violent
repercussions.
Native Americans and indigenous cultures around the globe offer
insights and wisdom beyond our extant mythic epistemology. Their
whole-worldview approach to knowing is by honoring human life
within the context of a comprehensive cosmology that informs views
of life and death, living and dying, and humans’ place in the universe.
In their cosmology, life and death, knowledge, and all of life’s events
are one great circle of the web of life. Real life, health, and illness
stories of healing, survival, changing, dying are beyond humans’ full
control; they have to be considered within the web of life itself, from
a wiser knowledge system, a larger cosmology, a larger ethic than our
human lens. This shift to a larger cosmology is essential if we are to
sustain humanity for both human and planetary survival at this point
in history (Levinas 1969).

reconsidering nightingale as exeMplar and Model
Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, was a visionary
with respect to cosmologies of wholeness, expanded epistemologies,
and foundational ethics and values that guided her in her work and her
world. She possessed insights, wisdom, intuition, vision, and knowl-
edge that incorporated entire knowledge systems. Yet the rhetorical
and realistic questions and issues triggered by the Chinese physician
in 1978 are still facing nursing education and health-sciences educa-
tion today.
Nightingale’s vision and focus for nursing and health serve us all,
once again, as an exemplar as we consider and reconsider these haunt-
ing questions for nursing education’s future. For example, she per-
ceived people as multidimensional beings, with all aspects addressed by
medicine and nursing. Her views of health incorporated physical, psy-
chological, mental, and social, as well as environmental and spiritual,

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