In 1999, AACN’s membership voted to endorse a position statement on Defining Scholarship for the Discipline of Nursing, which focused on four aspects of scholarship that are salient to academic nursing – discovery, teaching, applications in clinical practice, and integration of ideas from nursing and other disciplines. This document was developed to clarify the scholarly work of nursing in academic settings and has been used extensively over the past 17 years to guide promotion, tenure, and merit reviews for nurse educators. Given the changes that have occurred within health care and higher education since 1999, and in light of the new definition of academic nursing contained in the AACN-Manatt report, this landmark AACN position statement should be revisited to ensure that it fully captures contemporary expectations related to nursing scholarship.
The Task Force will:
1. Evaluate AACN’s 1999 Position Statement on Defining Scholarship for the Discipline of Nursing in light of the new definition for Academic Nursing, as outlined in the AACN-Manatt report Advancing Healthcare Transformation: A New Era for Academic Nursing.
2. Propose a definition of scholarship as related to education, research, and practice that accounts for trends in new research methods, concerns for improving health, and multiple ways of knowing.
3. Differentiate how scholarship might be operationalized by nurses prepared in research-focused and practice-focused doctorates.
4. Consider contemporary issues around tenure and how they are related to production of nursing scholarship.
5. Describe the integration of scholarship across institutional missions and how scholarship is promoted via improvement science, participatory action research, team science, and big data and how it is translated to practice.
Please address your comments to either the chair or AACN staff liaison noted.
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