Undergraduate nursing curriculum building: an exploration into the ‘sciences’ requirements

Abstract

Academic nursing studies programmes are often channelled into one or other existing academic discipline. This limits the development of nursing knowledge which needs to be broader and more varied than a one-discipline orientation. Nursing students' epistemological difficulties arise because of inherent tensions brought about when the paradigms of such disciplines and practice requirements conflict, which so often they do. Interpretive sociological approaches as intellectual orientation for nursing studies offer a way out as their reflective patterns may encourage consciousness development and, through it, point towards changes.