Scholarship, teaching, and service elements of the Tripartite Model can be applied to the role of a nurse educator. The role that should be pursued in education is a nurse educator whose duties go beyond only imparting knowledge to nursing students. A nurse educator performs a variety of responsibilities in addition to adhering to the professional triad of teaching, scholarship, and service (Akhter et al., 2020). New nursing educators might enter the classroom in various ways, such as adjunct faculty, guest lecturers, associate or full professors, or even as student mentors. The number of educated nurses is increasing as a result of advancements in nursing education and the expansion of graduate and doctoral programs. The role of nurse educators is beyond merely providing knowledge to the students; instead, they should provide guidance and support to their students.
Nursing students are taught by nurse educators, which makes the latter’s role essential in the development of the new generation of healthcare professionals. They are in charge of creating, putting into action, reviewing, and amending educational programs for nurses (Shellenbarger, 2019). Nurse educators might concentrate on specialty nursing fields like pediatric nursing, psychiatric nursing, or nursing informatics or teach general nursing courses (Akhter et al., 2020). Scholarship activities specific to the role that will help to become a change agent include instructing classes in continuing education, certificate, or formal academic programs leading to degrees.
A personal plan to achieve these based on the desired role of the nurse educator is based on practicing nursing professionally in the area of expertise and remaining an active member of the greater nursing community through a variety of professional nursing organizations. Professionals in nursing education must possess strong leadership qualities as well as in-depth knowledge of their industry in order to do their duties well. In this way, the service element of the Tripatriate Model becomes integral to the nurse educator’s role.
The first component of the tripartite is the adjunct which is in charge of writing their own curriculum and is also responsible for giving clinical instruction, giving feedback, and evaluating students. There is more to teaching the students than only lecturing. It involves using all the resources an adjunct may have at their disposal to arrange the knowledge they are trained in the classroom. Activities to meet this role include designing learning experiences and utilizing theories, pedagogies, strategies, and educational technologies to encourage active learning, stimulate critical thinking, and ensure professional role development and competent entry-level nurses, it is also to advise, mentor, and coach learners throughout various stages of their good work as teachers.
The second component of the tripartite is service, current nursing faculty members work in service contexts for a portion of their employment. New nurse educators do activities outside the job description that allow them to give back to the students, the school, the patients, the community, and the profession. Compared to other academic fields outside of allied health, fewer nursing faculty members successfully earn tenure because it is not always advisable (Fitzgerald et al., 2019). These low figures have been linked to these female professionals’ poor scholarly achievement due to their socialization to practice and service.
The third tripartite of a nursing educator is scholarship. One must meet specific academic and practical requirements to be a licensed instructor. These credentials are the bare minimum; an educator should always be learning new things. Creative output, theory or method development, integrated scholarship, grant application writing, course development, continuing education, holding workshops, supervising graduate and undergraduate research projects, and earning a terminal degree are a few examples of scholarly and creative activities.
Adjunct professors must have a strategy or objective in mind. One would assume that the learner would successfully learn the material and be able to apply and act upon it during volunteer activities. Purposeful incorporating of the service-learning paradigm and involving students as dynamically as feasible are competencies, particularly related to the change agent role. In order to engage civic-minded healthcare professionals who grow into engaged and purposefully caring citizens, adjunct instructors can do this by involving students in their courses and incorporating learning and reflection as a central theme (Fitzgerald et al., 2019) A well-thought-out course syllabus, clear course objectives, and a connection between all of the objectives and the course material are essential components of an educator’s strategy.
References
Akhter, Z., Malik, G., & Plummer, V. (2021). Nurse educator knowledge, attitude and skills towards using high-fidelity simulation: A study in the vocational education sector. Nurse Education in Practice, 53, 103048. Web.
Fitzgerald, A., McNelis, A., & Billings, D. (2019). NLN core competencies for nurse educators: Are they present in the course descriptions of academic nurse educator programs? Nursing Education Perspectives, 41(1), 4-9. Web.
Shellenbarger, T. (2019). Clinical nurse educator competencies. National League for Nursing.