Reflect on the readings and the video and then write a couple of succinct paragraphs addressing the two questions below. Rather than set a word limit, please work on clarity and brevity in your response. As nursing scholars this is an important task to master. It may take a couple drafts for you to achieve a response that you really like, but keep trying. An exercise like this holds the possibility to deepen and improve your writing skills!
While you work on this think about moving the discipline of nursing forward as students and as advancing practitioners. Carper offered foundational work with her Ways of Knowing that later scholars critiqued and aimed to expand on. I want you to think both about that process itself and about how you decide as a scholar what to do with new disciplinary knowledge. In other words, are there now more than 4 ways of knowing or do you see these new concepts as aspects of Carper’s original modalities? Are sociopolitical knowing and spiritual knowing potential “bullet-points” to be included under each original way of knowing or do they need their own categories? Are there 5 or 6 ways of knowing? Or more? Does it matter?
Questions:
1) In your own words, define each of Carper’s four ways of knowing. Then share how you use Carper’s four ways of knowing to enhance your nursing practice. In your experience, are some of Carper’s ways of knowing easier to use than others? Why?
Then briefly define the proposed sociopolitical and spiritual knowing in nursing. Are these new ways of knowing for you? How do you think that you use these additional ways of knowing in your nursing practice?
2) How does the discipline of nursing benefit from having a distinct set of knowing or knowledge gaining modalities? How do your patients benefit from a disciplinary focus on ways of knowing? How will you as a nurse benefit as you advance in the profession?
As stated above, work on refining your paragraphs so that they are succinct. You will bring them with you to your discussion time and use them to assist you in the class discussion. Reading directly from your paragraphs is not expected; you will use them as a reference during the Zoom discussion with your classmates.
