Nursing Education

Histories of nursing education typically date to the introduction of formal trained nursing in western Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. White women reformers introduced nurse training programs in hospital-based nursing schools to help modernize the hospital and provide suitable employment for growing numbers of young women seeking paid work. Nurses were selected, properly trained, and differentiated from their untrained predecessors, primarily on the basis of character, which in turn was defined by idealized conceptions of whiteness, femaleness, and middle-class status. Many scholars have analyzed how ideologies of race, gender, and class intersected in the development of nursing education and shaped the experiences and identities of those who trained as nurses, including nurses of color and men nurses who navigated race- and gender-based barriers to nursing education. Through the early twentieth century, North American nurses’ efforts to introduce educational reforms were undermined by hospitals’ reliance on nursing students as a cheap labor force. However, by the mid-twentieth century, university-based nursing schools were increasingly the site of both general and postgraduate nursing education. New educational opportunities were also introduced to tackle persistent nursing shortages, including the creation of new subsidiary nursing roles. Scholars have interrogated these educational reforms and considered how nurses’ educational experiences influenced their identities, organizational culture, and professionalization efforts in North America. Since the late nineteenth century, nursing has been an integral component of imperialist projects throughout the world. Missionaries and colonial administrators saw trained nurses—and thus, the introduction of nursing education—as integral to disseminating Western biomedicine and hygienic practices and displacing Indigenous ways of knowing and healing in colonial spaces. For the European and American nurses who were part of these colonial projects, nursing education also provided colonized women with opportunities for educational mobility and social power. Scholars have examined the role of nursing in US imperialism, as well as the impacts of colonialism on Indigenous communities’ health and access to nursing education. Other scholars have analyzed the influence of colonialism, the role of Christian missionaries, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in the introduction and development of nursing education in Asia and Africa. Scholars have also examined the introduction and development of nursing education in the United Kingdom and several European countries. This scholarship makes clear how the distinctive social, cultural, institutional, political, and economic context of different geographic places shaped the development of nursing education and the experiences and identities of those who trained and worked as nurses.