Learning to Nurse: Plans, Accounts, and Action

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Abstract
This article reports a study of the relation between learning and work in nursing. Using "institutional ethnography," it examines the learning process in the final year of a three-year nursing program in a Canadian college, preparing graduates for RN exams. The article is concerned with how the learning process is shaped by the use of a formal model rooted in a scientific model of nursing and how that model's use contributes to making the learning process reportable as comprehensive, orderly, and adequate to professional requirements. But it finds evidence of a gap between achievement of "accountably adequate instruction" and requirements for appropriate action in the nursing situation. These findings suggest that models of nursing science may serve the profession in contradictory ways by contributing to the very problems they are meant to solve.

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