Professional Nurses as Global Citizens: Developing an Integrated Approach in Undergraduate Nursing Curricula

As university and nursing programs place more emphasis on global perspectives in their strategic plans and goals, it is frequently unclear how these perspectives are integrated into curricula. With globalization processes impacting health and education throughout the world, it is timely to understand the current context in order to move ahead to promote the development of professional nurses as global citizens. The interpretive descriptive study explored the characteristics and qualities of global citizenship and global health from the perspective of 12 expert informant nursing education leaders from undergraduate nursing programs within Canada. The study also examined curricular and pedagogical directions that would promote the integration of global citizenship education within nursing programs. In addition to the interview as the main data collection tool, field notes and a reflective journal was used in data gathering. The findings are presented as qualitative description and were analyzed using the interpretive description method. The findings of this study revealed several characteristics of global citizenship and curricular directions for global citizenship education, including particular courses, curricular lenses and a variety of concepts. Pedagogical strategies were described as well as the challenges to the integration of these approaches for nursing education.