- Email: [email protected]
Editorial for 35th Anniversary Issue
Nurse Education Today 42 (2016) 57–58
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Nurse Education Today journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/nedt
Editorial
Editorial for 35th Anniversary Issue Nursing Education and ‘Room 101’
I must thank Billy Lauder for the opportunity to write an editorial to mark this 35th birthday of Nurse Education Today, an especially apposite date for me as my first paper in this esteemed journal was published almost that long ago (Johnson, 1983). On that occasion I bemoaned the standard of nursing education in ‘ethics’, which in the UK at the time amounted to how nurses must wear their cap and how one mustn't read gruesome surgical textbooks in public places. Although I don't regard myself as especially grumpy, I will take the opportunity both of no longer being the editor myself and of retiring shortly from my chair at the University of Salford to make what I think are important observations on the state of nursing education as I see it. In the UK we have a TV programme based on George Orwell's '1984' (Penguin Classics, 1984; first pub. 1949) and called ROOM 101 chaired by Frank Skinner in which guests make an argument to dispose of things they hate for all time. I shall aim to do the same here with my top few ‘hates’.
1. Bureaucracy First, I must make a nod to the overwhelming paperwork, electronic or otherwise, which has overtaken nursing teachers/lecturers. It would seem that now, a course unit or module, which in principle could be outlined on a sheet of A4 paper in all important respects, is now subject to scrutiny of no less than 20 or 30 people at a course approval meeting including accountants, and many academics not in the least conversant with the subject at hand. When I started in university level nursing education a module was run by rarely more than two people and both were such experts in the field that no-one would reasonably have argued with their view of what should be in the course or how it should be taught and assessed. If feedback were needed at all this came from the students and of course external examiners for whom our esteem was unimpeachable, we had hand-picked them. We had what might be called autonomy and which has been gravely eroded by ‘quality managers’ some of which do little or no teaching and often have little in the way of research outputs on which to base their professional knowledge. We frequently mark assignments on-line, which might seem like something advantageous in the ‘digital world’. Certainly I cannot deny that an opportunity to check for plagiarism is a boon both to staff and, hopefully, to students. Sadly, however, the mark we enter on the ‘Turnitin’ (or similar) comments page doesn't talk to the University grade recording systems so the same mark needs to be entered at least twice in further places more than one keystroke away and in different software. A great reduction in the number of support administrators also means that further mark sheets often may need to be stored on
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2016.04.013 0260-6917/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
central servers for issue to students. The same marks are then entered yet again on reports to external examiners and internal moderators. Need I go on? The re-engineering of education in general and nursing education in particular has led to an excessive and self-perpetuating bureaucracy, to the detriment of all. Bureaucracy to ROOM 101. 2. The Digital Future No, the current features and benefits of the digital world have been oversold, a bit like personal protection insurance. Many systems are not yet really fit for purpose. The ‘plagiarism software’ and ‘digital learning systems’ like Blackboard are regularly unavailable, even at assessment time so that deadlines need to be extended and students and staff are at the very least perplexed and in some cases devastated by the frankly unfit infrastructure. 3. Targets and the ‘National Student Survey’ Forgive me if I target the ‘National Student Survey’, a key feature now of the UK higher education landscape. It too has become an end in itself rather than a valid and reliable tool to estimate student opinion and to compare their experience across the sector. Deans now worry about the percentage compliance (response rate) rather than what students may say and students are often herded into rooms and rewarded for completion. In order to attempt to affect its outcome large posters are placed all over the campuses more or less telling students what to say. ‘Teaching is brilliant’ for example. Perhaps students are actually not as bright as we hope and they are influenced by these instructions, but any research we might do in our role as academics would be immediately invalidated by evidence that respondents had been told what to say. Personally I hope it's counter-productive and that students will tell us when their ‘Blackboard’, ‘Turnitin’ or similar product has been disastrous for them. Certainly if there were a question about car parking things would not look good. Staff car parks are far from full when students are queuing up the main road, not ideal when increasingly they are paying big fees to be at University, and nurses in the UK will be too very soon. 4. Systematic Review: Ignoring the Seminal Works The progress towards making the clinical world of nursing and midwifery much more evidence based is of course wonderful. It is pleasing to see in a recent survey of Scopus ‘H Indices’ (Watson et al., 2016) that the ‘top’ UK nurse researcher is Professor Dame Nicky Cullum of
58
Editorial
Manchester University who, by any standard, has improved the evidence base of wound management, a nursing specialty if ever there was, by an enormous amount. A world-leading researcher, thank goodness, studying something that matters to patients, improves lives and relieves suffering. Indeed Nicky probably led the nursing world in effective systematic reviewing of the literature before she then moved on to high quality trials. The techniques of searching for, critically reviewing and synthesizing knowledge have developed amazingly. They are not, however, always appropriate, used naively, for discussing wider issues such as ethics, occupational socialization, and other more abstract issues. All too frequently students mimicking systematic reviewers select search terms that are too narrow and especially set their search parameters too recently. It would be nonsense, for example, to search the literature on ‘the hidden curriculum’ and not find, ‘The silent dialogue’ (Olesen and Whittaker, 1967), Fred Davis's ‘Five sociological essays’ (Davis, 1966), ‘Reality shock’ (Kramer, 1974), ‘Learning and working’ (Melia, 1987) and so on. Of course digital searching, used properly, has added depth and rigour to the rather ad hoc but fascinating explorations done mainly in the bowels of a major library which were actually rather interesting but so rarely happen now. So, as important as systematic literature searching is, it is often a smokescreen under which the very most important literature is ignored because of age or some spurious claims to lack of rigour. People who think everything worth knowing happened after 2006 to ROOM 101 please. 5. Journals Not Worthy of the Name It would be a shame not to send to ROOM 101 the constant ‘invitations I now get to publish in journals I have never heard of. As a previous editor of this particular journal I cherish it greatly, but I am not unaware of the conflict many academics have between ‘author pays', ‘open access' and ‘reader (or library) pays’ models of publishing. Of course on the traditional model the major publishers have done well out of academics who mainly write for free, reviewers who review for free and editors who, though often remunerated, are paid made a mere fraction of the amount they are worth for the amount and quality of their input. They do it for lots of reasons but cash isn't one of them. But in contradistinction to this is the huge bandwagon of new journals, some not even addressing a particular discipline, which claim to be reputable, quick and of high quality. I have myself published papers of which I′m quite proud with on-line only journals run by good university departments and people of quality, even when quite new (Johnson, 2005). We will all have to learn the hard way how to discern which will be the more permanent and credible places to publish in addition to those of the established publishers' monopoly. But if someone will please produce a simple tool to evaluate the validity of such journals, especially for new academics desperate to get into print, I would be made a little less grumpy. Conferences are wonderful things, as anyone who spent $2000 going to one for a week or so and meeting friends rather than sitting at their computer writing a paper will tell you (though the paper will last a lot longer and mean more on your CV). Of course there is also a potentially strong relationship between journals and conferences, one which I myself chose to exploit, with Karen Holland and Elsevier's help, in developing the Nurse Education Today and Nurse Education in Practice (NETNEP) Biennial International Education Conferences from 2006 onwards. Sadly, this market is also being abused by unscrupulous entrepreneurs who write to us ‘inviting’ papers. Now call me old fashioned, but you are not ‘invited’ to a conference unless the organizers are paying at least your travel and accommodation. Even today I received two such emails, from people I've never heard of, claiming to ‘invite’ me on to be on an organizing committee for such and such a conference many thousands of miles away. No, all those ‘publish with us’ and ‘you are
invited to our conference’ emails from heaven knows where are going into ROOM 101. 6. Conclusions Perhaps it's my age, but my tolerance of nonsense has never been weaker. I've had my moments in the past, as anyone who knows my views on the pseudoscience of Parse, Rogers and their followers will realize. There are lots of other things I could send to ROOM 101, not least are ‘re-structuring’ and re-naming. Re-structuring is a waste of time, apart from being a way of reducing workforce strength and managing budgets or enforcing often ill-evidenced change. The great universities of England, that is to say Oxford and Cambridge have a truly archaic structure quite unlike most others and which defies explanation as to how it actually works. ‘Colleges’ do not change from Schools, to Colleges and back to Faculties again every couple of years (as many do), and students live and work in strange mixes of disciplines all over the campuses. And so they have for nearly a thousand years. The benefits of this are enormous, though hard for bureaucrats to see. Internationally the truly great universities and departments DO NOT change their names even if they do not now accurately describe the facility. Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (CALTEC), London School of Economics (LSE) all sound like small colleges for post 16 education not universities, but they are in fact the best, or among the best, universities in the world. They know what they are good at and they get on with it. Gary Rolfe has written a wonderful book which deals much more cerebrally with these and other problems faced by higher education, and in it he argues that academics need to develop a subversive part of their life in which they continue to do the real things and not the ROOM 101 things for at least part of their time. It takes courage and determination, but it might be possible and his ideas repay attention (Rolfe, 2013). I am sure that the real quality and indeed the innovation of these more ‘traditional’ institutions come from bright, motivated people (students and staff) not ‘quality assurance’ as such. But to realize the ambitions of nursing to be recognized with the other strong research based and well educated disciplines we need to move on from ‘quality bureaucracy’ to high quality teaching, scholarship and research. Believe me, they are not the same. References Davis, F., 1966. The Nursing Profession: Five Sociological Essays. John Wiley and Sons, New York. Johnson, M., 1983. Ethics in nurse eduation: a comment. Nurse Educ. Today 3 (3), 58–59. Johnson, M., 2005. Notes on the tension between privacy and surveillance in nursing. On-Line Journal of Issues in Nursing 10 (No.2) (Manuscript 3. Retrieved 13 July 2005, 2005, from http://nursingworld.org/ojin/topic27/tpc27_3.htm). Kramer, M., 1974. Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing. Mosby, St Louis. Melia, K., 1987. Learning and Working: The Occupational Socialisation of Student Nurses. Tavistock, London. Olesen, V., Whittaker, E., 1967. The Silent Dialogue. Jossey Bass, San Francisco. Rolfe, G., 2013. The university in dissent: Scholarship in the corporate university. Routledge, London and New York. Watson, R., et al., 2016. h-indices: an update on the performance of professors in nursing in the UK. J. Adv. Nurs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.12924 (Supplementary data).
Martin Johnson University of Salford, M6 6PT, UK E-mail address: [email protected].
Available online xxxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Nurse Education Today journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/nedt
Editorial
Editorial for 35th Anniversary Issue Nursing Education and ‘Room 101’
I must thank Billy Lauder for the opportunity to write an editorial to mark this 35th birthday of Nurse Education Today, an especially apposite date for me as my first paper in this esteemed journal was published almost that long ago (Johnson, 1983). On that occasion I bemoaned the standard of nursing education in ‘ethics’, which in the UK at the time amounted to how nurses must wear their cap and how one mustn't read gruesome surgical textbooks in public places. Although I don't regard myself as especially grumpy, I will take the opportunity both of no longer being the editor myself and of retiring shortly from my chair at the University of Salford to make what I think are important observations on the state of nursing education as I see it. In the UK we have a TV programme based on George Orwell's '1984' (Penguin Classics, 1984; first pub. 1949) and called ROOM 101 chaired by Frank Skinner in which guests make an argument to dispose of things they hate for all time. I shall aim to do the same here with my top few ‘hates’.
1. Bureaucracy First, I must make a nod to the overwhelming paperwork, electronic or otherwise, which has overtaken nursing teachers/lecturers. It would seem that now, a course unit or module, which in principle could be outlined on a sheet of A4 paper in all important respects, is now subject to scrutiny of no less than 20 or 30 people at a course approval meeting including accountants, and many academics not in the least conversant with the subject at hand. When I started in university level nursing education a module was run by rarely more than two people and both were such experts in the field that no-one would reasonably have argued with their view of what should be in the course or how it should be taught and assessed. If feedback were needed at all this came from the students and of course external examiners for whom our esteem was unimpeachable, we had hand-picked them. We had what might be called autonomy and which has been gravely eroded by ‘quality managers’ some of which do little or no teaching and often have little in the way of research outputs on which to base their professional knowledge. We frequently mark assignments on-line, which might seem like something advantageous in the ‘digital world’. Certainly I cannot deny that an opportunity to check for plagiarism is a boon both to staff and, hopefully, to students. Sadly, however, the mark we enter on the ‘Turnitin’ (or similar) comments page doesn't talk to the University grade recording systems so the same mark needs to be entered at least twice in further places more than one keystroke away and in different software. A great reduction in the number of support administrators also means that further mark sheets often may need to be stored on
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2016.04.013 0260-6917/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
central servers for issue to students. The same marks are then entered yet again on reports to external examiners and internal moderators. Need I go on? The re-engineering of education in general and nursing education in particular has led to an excessive and self-perpetuating bureaucracy, to the detriment of all. Bureaucracy to ROOM 101. 2. The Digital Future No, the current features and benefits of the digital world have been oversold, a bit like personal protection insurance. Many systems are not yet really fit for purpose. The ‘plagiarism software’ and ‘digital learning systems’ like Blackboard are regularly unavailable, even at assessment time so that deadlines need to be extended and students and staff are at the very least perplexed and in some cases devastated by the frankly unfit infrastructure. 3. Targets and the ‘National Student Survey’ Forgive me if I target the ‘National Student Survey’, a key feature now of the UK higher education landscape. It too has become an end in itself rather than a valid and reliable tool to estimate student opinion and to compare their experience across the sector. Deans now worry about the percentage compliance (response rate) rather than what students may say and students are often herded into rooms and rewarded for completion. In order to attempt to affect its outcome large posters are placed all over the campuses more or less telling students what to say. ‘Teaching is brilliant’ for example. Perhaps students are actually not as bright as we hope and they are influenced by these instructions, but any research we might do in our role as academics would be immediately invalidated by evidence that respondents had been told what to say. Personally I hope it's counter-productive and that students will tell us when their ‘Blackboard’, ‘Turnitin’ or similar product has been disastrous for them. Certainly if there were a question about car parking things would not look good. Staff car parks are far from full when students are queuing up the main road, not ideal when increasingly they are paying big fees to be at University, and nurses in the UK will be too very soon. 4. Systematic Review: Ignoring the Seminal Works The progress towards making the clinical world of nursing and midwifery much more evidence based is of course wonderful. It is pleasing to see in a recent survey of Scopus ‘H Indices’ (Watson et al., 2016) that the ‘top’ UK nurse researcher is Professor Dame Nicky Cullum of
58
Editorial
Manchester University who, by any standard, has improved the evidence base of wound management, a nursing specialty if ever there was, by an enormous amount. A world-leading researcher, thank goodness, studying something that matters to patients, improves lives and relieves suffering. Indeed Nicky probably led the nursing world in effective systematic reviewing of the literature before she then moved on to high quality trials. The techniques of searching for, critically reviewing and synthesizing knowledge have developed amazingly. They are not, however, always appropriate, used naively, for discussing wider issues such as ethics, occupational socialization, and other more abstract issues. All too frequently students mimicking systematic reviewers select search terms that are too narrow and especially set their search parameters too recently. It would be nonsense, for example, to search the literature on ‘the hidden curriculum’ and not find, ‘The silent dialogue’ (Olesen and Whittaker, 1967), Fred Davis's ‘Five sociological essays’ (Davis, 1966), ‘Reality shock’ (Kramer, 1974), ‘Learning and working’ (Melia, 1987) and so on. Of course digital searching, used properly, has added depth and rigour to the rather ad hoc but fascinating explorations done mainly in the bowels of a major library which were actually rather interesting but so rarely happen now. So, as important as systematic literature searching is, it is often a smokescreen under which the very most important literature is ignored because of age or some spurious claims to lack of rigour. People who think everything worth knowing happened after 2006 to ROOM 101 please. 5. Journals Not Worthy of the Name It would be a shame not to send to ROOM 101 the constant ‘invitations I now get to publish in journals I have never heard of. As a previous editor of this particular journal I cherish it greatly, but I am not unaware of the conflict many academics have between ‘author pays', ‘open access' and ‘reader (or library) pays’ models of publishing. Of course on the traditional model the major publishers have done well out of academics who mainly write for free, reviewers who review for free and editors who, though often remunerated, are paid made a mere fraction of the amount they are worth for the amount and quality of their input. They do it for lots of reasons but cash isn't one of them. But in contradistinction to this is the huge bandwagon of new journals, some not even addressing a particular discipline, which claim to be reputable, quick and of high quality. I have myself published papers of which I′m quite proud with on-line only journals run by good university departments and people of quality, even when quite new (Johnson, 2005). We will all have to learn the hard way how to discern which will be the more permanent and credible places to publish in addition to those of the established publishers' monopoly. But if someone will please produce a simple tool to evaluate the validity of such journals, especially for new academics desperate to get into print, I would be made a little less grumpy. Conferences are wonderful things, as anyone who spent $2000 going to one for a week or so and meeting friends rather than sitting at their computer writing a paper will tell you (though the paper will last a lot longer and mean more on your CV). Of course there is also a potentially strong relationship between journals and conferences, one which I myself chose to exploit, with Karen Holland and Elsevier's help, in developing the Nurse Education Today and Nurse Education in Practice (NETNEP) Biennial International Education Conferences from 2006 onwards. Sadly, this market is also being abused by unscrupulous entrepreneurs who write to us ‘inviting’ papers. Now call me old fashioned, but you are not ‘invited’ to a conference unless the organizers are paying at least your travel and accommodation. Even today I received two such emails, from people I've never heard of, claiming to ‘invite’ me on to be on an organizing committee for such and such a conference many thousands of miles away. No, all those ‘publish with us’ and ‘you are
invited to our conference’ emails from heaven knows where are going into ROOM 101. 6. Conclusions Perhaps it's my age, but my tolerance of nonsense has never been weaker. I've had my moments in the past, as anyone who knows my views on the pseudoscience of Parse, Rogers and their followers will realize. There are lots of other things I could send to ROOM 101, not least are ‘re-structuring’ and re-naming. Re-structuring is a waste of time, apart from being a way of reducing workforce strength and managing budgets or enforcing often ill-evidenced change. The great universities of England, that is to say Oxford and Cambridge have a truly archaic structure quite unlike most others and which defies explanation as to how it actually works. ‘Colleges’ do not change from Schools, to Colleges and back to Faculties again every couple of years (as many do), and students live and work in strange mixes of disciplines all over the campuses. And so they have for nearly a thousand years. The benefits of this are enormous, though hard for bureaucrats to see. Internationally the truly great universities and departments DO NOT change their names even if they do not now accurately describe the facility. Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (CALTEC), London School of Economics (LSE) all sound like small colleges for post 16 education not universities, but they are in fact the best, or among the best, universities in the world. They know what they are good at and they get on with it. Gary Rolfe has written a wonderful book which deals much more cerebrally with these and other problems faced by higher education, and in it he argues that academics need to develop a subversive part of their life in which they continue to do the real things and not the ROOM 101 things for at least part of their time. It takes courage and determination, but it might be possible and his ideas repay attention (Rolfe, 2013). I am sure that the real quality and indeed the innovation of these more ‘traditional’ institutions come from bright, motivated people (students and staff) not ‘quality assurance’ as such. But to realize the ambitions of nursing to be recognized with the other strong research based and well educated disciplines we need to move on from ‘quality bureaucracy’ to high quality teaching, scholarship and research. Believe me, they are not the same. References Davis, F., 1966. The Nursing Profession: Five Sociological Essays. John Wiley and Sons, New York. Johnson, M., 1983. Ethics in nurse eduation: a comment. Nurse Educ. Today 3 (3), 58–59. Johnson, M., 2005. Notes on the tension between privacy and surveillance in nursing. On-Line Journal of Issues in Nursing 10 (No.2) (Manuscript 3. Retrieved 13 July 2005, 2005, from http://nursingworld.org/ojin/topic27/tpc27_3.htm). Kramer, M., 1974. Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing. Mosby, St Louis. Melia, K., 1987. Learning and Working: The Occupational Socialisation of Student Nurses. Tavistock, London. Olesen, V., Whittaker, E., 1967. The Silent Dialogue. Jossey Bass, San Francisco. Rolfe, G., 2013. The university in dissent: Scholarship in the corporate university. Routledge, London and New York. Watson, R., et al., 2016. h-indices: an update on the performance of professors in nursing in the UK. J. Adv. Nurs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.12924 (Supplementary data).
Martin Johnson University of Salford, M6 6PT, UK E-mail address: [email protected].
Available online xxxx