Beyond Words: Fostering Students’ Engagement with Social Justice through an Unessay Assignment in Nursingg

Project Lead: Lydia Wytenbroek, Nursing

Project description

Social justice is central to nursing practice, but nursing curricula often fails to employ an antiracist and decolonizing pedagogy (Bell, 2021). Structural issues including the centrality of the biomedical model and a rigid curriculum constrained by regulatory and accreditation processes mean that nursing faculty find it hard to address social justice (Bell, 2023). Last year I implemented a novel unessay assignment (replacing a traditional essay) in NURS 300. This assignment encourages students to work collectively on a creative project in a format of their choosing. Student projects address racism, nurse activism, and the sociopolitical context of healthcare in relation to course objectives. The aim of this project is to evaluate how the unessay assignment fosters nursing students’ awareness and engagement with social justice.

Research questions

  1. How does the unessay project foster nursing students’ awareness and engagement with social justice?
  2. In a recent article, co-authored with 2 of my grad students (Kyra and Ismalia), we argue that institutional relationships of power are reproduced in scholarship unless there is space for radical re-imaginations. To disrupt this, we suggest that arts-based methodology is a site for democratization in nursing knowledge (Philbert et al, 2024). Arts-based research can challenge the idea that scientific inquiry is the only format of valid knowledge production in nursing (Archibald, 2017). I am thus interested in this question: What value does the integration of the arts and sciences have for nursing and how might an arts based assignment encourage reflective practice and critical thinking?