Edinburgh Napier University

  This thesis provides a critical reflection on my original contributions to knowledge in the field of nursing practice and nurse education over the last decade. I selected eight publications from my work to represent the trajectory of my thinking. Collectively they demonstrate an ongoing and incrementally developing conceptual approach through which I make connections across the disciplines of Nursing and Education in accordance with the Boyerian ‘Scholarship of Integration’. The papers are grouped into three sets, and are then linked by a final capstone paper that draws the emerging ideas together.

The initial group of papers focus on the nature of nursing expertise and compassionate care across a range of practice contexts. These papers illuminate important but often hidden ideas relating to expert practice. The implicit underpinning concepts within these papers became progressively more explicit and well-articulated over the ten-year period as I developed my approach and thinking.

A second suite of papers share a common focus on stories gathered through the use of the “emotional touch-points” research method; this was designed to capture stakeholder lived experience.

The third set of papers demonstrates my interest in applying ideas from practice based research to educational environments. This was achieved by integrating them in a range of pedagogical contexts to maximise the learning opportunities for student nurses by scaffolding the development of nursing craft and ‘know-how’. These educationally-oriented papers articulate some of the underpinning benefits and challenges encountered in attempting to support student development in this area. This included the difficulties of rendering the tacit nature of compassionate knowhow explicit, and recognisable by novices.

Finally in line with Boyer’s notion of the scholarship of integration, my evolving ideas and interests progressively culminated in my final paper. In this capstone paper I integrated concepts and ideas from beyond the discipline of nursing to foreground and raise awareness of tacit knowledge in nursing expert-practice to promote its development in student nurses. This paper contributes a novel recombinant innovation by combining compassionate care and craftsmanship.