Learning Across the Professions: The
Clergy, a Case in Point
Patricia Benner, PhD, RN; and Molly Sutphen, PhD
ABSTRACT
In this article, we examine similarities and differences in the
educational goals and pedagogies of nursing and clergy students. We
argue that nurse educators can learn a broader perspective of
rationality than the narrow, technical rationality of instrumental
problem solving taught in most professional schools. An interpretive
form of rationality is needed to address suffering and human concerns
in the world. The pedagogies of interpretation, formation,
contextualization, and performance used in clergy education offer a
more interpretive, historical, and contextual approach to reasoning.
ne hundred years after Abraham Flexner (1910) published his
O report on medical education in the United
States and Canada, the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching is reexamining education in the
professions. As part of a broad series of studies entitled the
“Preparation for the Professions Program,” the Carnegie Foundation
is studying the education of professionals in engineering, the clergy,
law, medicine, and nursing.
Received: December 19, 2006
Accepted: January 19, 2007
Dr. Benner is Thelma Shobe Professor of Ethics and Spirituality
in Health Care, University of California, San Francisco, San
Francisco, California. Dr. Benner is also Senior Scholar and Dr.
Sutphen is Research Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, Stanford, California.
The authors acknowledge the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, the Atlantic Philanthropies, and the
Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair Fund for funding this work.
Address correspondence to Patricia Benner, PhD, RN, Thelma
Shobe Professor of Ethics and Spirituality in Health Care, University
of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing, Box 0612, 3333
California Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94118; e-mail: Patricia.
Benner@ucsf.edu.
In the 1960s when Parsons (1949) was writing about
professions, neither clergy nor nursing would have been studied,
or even included, in the same series as law or medicine. However,
the first of the Carnegie Foundation studies to be published,
Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination
(Foster, Dahill, Golemon, & Tolentino, 2005), highlights many
issues in professional education that are shared by the clergy,
nursing, and medicine. Each Carnegie Foundation study
examines teaching and learning for practice and draws on
perspectives from those outside and inside of the profession. In
addition to studying each profession in its own right, the Carnegie
Foundation seeks to learn from crossprofessional comparisons,
and with Educating Clergy, there is now a basis for these
comparisons. What are the commonalities and differences? What
March 2007, Vol. 46, No. 3
might be translated and transported between professions? In this
article, we compare clergy and nursing education, focusing in
particular on what nursing education can learn from clergy
education.
BACkgRouND
During 2004-2005, the interdisciplinary Carnegie Foundation
research team visited nine schools of nursing, representing all
kinds of entry-to-practice programs considered to have a
reputation for excellence in teaching and high success rates on
licensure examinations. With informed consent and human
subjects protection approval from the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching and the University of California,
San Francisco, the research team conducted interviews with
administrators, faculty, students, course coordinators, and clinical
instructors.
The team conducted interviews with teachers responsible for
and students enrolled in pivotal courses, meaning courses that
faculty identified as central to the overall success of students in
the program. In addition to the audiotaped interviews of faculty
and students, the team members observed the classes and, when
applicable, the clinical instruction associated with the class. All
interviews were transcribed and coded using nVivo software
version 2.0.
The team also developed extensive field notes for each visit
and conducted several debriefings on the site visits with
colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation. The site visits and
interview protocols were structured to allow comparisons across
the professions of clergy, engineering law, medicine, nursing,
and teaching. After analysis of the data from the nine site visits
was complete, the research team, in collaboration with the
national League for nursing, the American Association of
Colleges of nursing, and the national Student nurses Association,
developed three national Web-based surveys to confirm,
disconfirm, and extend the findings of the study.
ThRee high-LeveL APPReNTiCeShiPS: A
FRAMewoRk FoR PRoFeSSioNAL eDuCATioN
Each of the Carnegie Foundation studies draws on three high-
level apprenticeships required for all professional practice:
l Cognitive and conceptual training to think in ways typi-
cal of and important to nursing (learning how to think like a
nurse). l A skill-based apprenticeship of practice, where
skilled “know-how” and clinical judgment are learned in
particular situations.
l A moral and ethical apprenticeship to the social roles and
responsibilities of the profession, through which novices are
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 LEArnInG ACrOSS THE PrOFESSIOnS
introduced to the meaning of an integrated practice of all
dimensions of the profession.
Apprenticeship, as used here, is not a reference to historical
apprenticeship models of learning, such as in old diploma
schools where students provided the major portion of care to
patients. In the service-driven diploma programs of 40 years ago,
classroom instruction and planned clinical experience were in
short supply and subordinated to hospital service demands to care
for patients. Instead, in the Carnegie studies, apprenticeship is a
metaphor for the complex embodied, cognitive, skillful, ethical,
and experiential learning required in practice disciplines.
The notion of apprenticeship is useful in professional
education. Learning a complex practice in which knowledge is
situated and socially embedded demands practical reasoning,
skilled know-how, perceptual acuity, relational and
communication skills, and ethical comportment (Benner, Tanner,
& Chesla, 1996). Such an integrated practice is learned in formal
courses and through experiential learning in practice (Lave &
Wenger, 1991). Teaching and learning in each of the professions
(clergy, engineering, law, medicine, and nursing) depend on
opportunities for teaching and learning encountered in practice.
Our use of apprenticeship points to the complex nature of
situated knowledge in practice disciplines that cannot be
segmented into simple categories of cognitive, psychomotor, and
expressive skills (Bloom, 1968).
It is critical to the education of these professionals to integrate
knowledge, skill, and ethical comportment—what we have
called the three high-end apprenticeships. In nursing, these must
be integrated in experiences in the classroom, simulation
laboratory, and clinical practice. Learning about science and
possessing technical procedural know-how in general situations
is essential but not sufficient for becoming a nurse. Science and
technology have to be brought to bear on specific clinical
situations that call for definitive action on the part of nurses. One
study participant said:
I think it’s really basic knowledge that a nurse has to have. It’s just
like the skills lab. I really believe it’s fundamental knowledge that you
need to have to make these decisions. nursing is a profession where you
are thinking on your feet, literally. You have to be able to make very
quick decisions and analyze what’s going on with the patient quickly.
And then go communicate with the rest of the health care team. And if
you don’t have the fundamental basic science knowledge behind
[your practice], it completely falls apart.
In the best teaching observed in this study, teachers integrated all
three apprenticeships. By integrating the apprenticeships, students
learn the importance of an ongoing dialogue and connection between
the lessons of the day and experiential learning over time that forms
the skills and character of the practitioner.
eDuCATioN FoR A PRoFeSSioNAL PRACTiCe
A professional practice must be self-improving, with practitioners
keeping pace with changes in ideas or knowledge. A professional
practice also demands that its practitioners receive an education
guided by coherent notions of good outcomes. We draw on the
philosopher MacIntyre’s (1981) view that practice is socially
embedded and contains notions of good internal to it. Professional
practitioners develop the capacity for innovative action and problem
solving in open-ended, highstakes situations, in keeping with the
actual responsibilities and goals of practice. During their education,
104
nursing students are required to interpret complex practical situations
and act within the boundaries of good practice in many
underdetermined, open-ended situations. One clinical teacher pointed
out the importance of integrated experiential learning in actual
clinical settings:
It’s a precepted experience, but it is in the hospital, and they
[students] really feel like they’re working, and they really bring it all
together, to sort of push them from behind sometimes, to really come
to a point where you can say, “Yes, this student is ready to go out there
and make those critical thinking decisions and take care of those
patients.”
CRoSS-PRoFeSSioNAL CoMPARiSoNS
relying on the three apprenticeship framework, Educat-
ing Clergy (Foster et al., 2005) presents a lively critique of the limits
of technical professionalism, where professionalism is defined in
limited ways and the education of professionals focuses primarily on
scientific knowledge and a narrow vision of rationality trumps all
other kinds of knowing (Schon, 1987). Educating Clergy (Foster et
al., 2005) offers a vision of rationality that is broader and more
reliable than a narrow technical rationality prevalent in most
professional education today. We refer to what Taylor (1992) called
the snapshot reasoning of formal criteria-based reasoning or the
snapshot reasoning yielded by setting up scientific experiments that
yield yes or no answers on the basis of a comparison of two
conditions or situations with the same formal criteria. Taylor (1992)
compared this snapshot form of reasoning with reasoning in
transition, or reasoning in a situation as it changes and unfolds. The
kind of reasoning nurses and doctors must learn and use is a form of
practical reasoning or reasoning in transition. Pastoral reasoning and
discernment are also examples of practical reasoning. It is as Benner,
Hooper-Kyriakidis, and Stannard (1999) pointed out: Practical
reasoning is reasoning across time about the particular through
changes in the patient’s clinical situation and/or changes in the
clinician’s understanding of the situation.
The 1910 Flexner report on medical education compelled medical
educators to improve and advance science in their courses. The
Flexner report was also a harbinger of a view that favored a technical
professionalism that relies on science, rules, and regulations to
demarcate professional behavior. In a recent examination of
professionalism, Sullivan (2004), a scholar at the Carnegie
Foundation, identified the current period as a time of crisis and
breakdown of the professions, as exemplified by the Enron scandal,
the privileging of commercialism and efficiency in the hospitals, law
courts, and schools that house professional practice, and even the
broken relationship of trust with church congregations in sexual
abuse cases. In this time of breakdown and ethical breaches, a
prophetic vision of the possibility of transformative education and
transformative professional practice is needed. According to Foster
et al. (2005):
A distinguishing feature of professional education is the emphasis
on forming in students the dispositions, habits, knowledge, and skills
that cohere in professional identity and practice, commitments and
integrity. The pedagogies that clergy educators use toward this
purpose—formation—originate in the deepest intentions for
professional service: for doctors, and nurses, healing; for lawyers,
social order and justice; for teachers, learning; and for clergy,
engaging the mystery of human existence. (p. 100)
In contrast to technical professionalism, civic professionalism
demonstrates a broader view of rationality that includes the heart and
Journal of Nursing Education
the mind, the particular and the universal, and demands that
practitioners be able to interpret their actions and put them in context.
Educating Clergy (Foster et al., 2005) engages in a critical
discourse with modernity, without rejecting all of modernity. Just
when some people in academia are looking for ways to overcome a
narrow technical, atomistic individualism; nihilism and rampant
cynicism related to a narrow rational calculation of costs and
benefits; and commodification and economism, this work holds up
ways to minister to these problems with modernity, while being part
of it. The broader form of rationality in Educating Clergy, and in the
study on nursing education, places learners in a particular life world
and a particular situation. In clergy education, seminary students are
offered tools of relating to a tradition and a sacred text in the present
age, through pedagogies of interpretation, formation,
contextualization, and performance. Each of these four
BEnnEr & SUTPHEn
pedagogies takes a broader vision of rationality that involves the
mind, heart, and life world (or community) of the clergy student,
a vision we believe nurse educators should give to nursing
students, as well. Indeed, all professions could draw on this
broader view of rationality in which students see themselves as
part of a narrative of the profession that is embedded in a living
tradition. Foster et al. (2005) demonstrate how the knowledge and
capacities for interpretation, formation, contextualization, and
performance are essential to discernment in particular situations.
They are also essential to people engaging in a relationship with
a tradition and sacred texts that seek to disclose the universal and
mysterious.
FouR PeDAgogiCAL DoMAiNS Pedagogies of
interpretation
The goal of interpretation is to discover and experience new
understandings. Pedagogies of interpretation, as used in clergy
education, could help nursing and medical students move away
from pedagogies of objectification or mechanistic explanations of
care that do not ask learners to draw on their own experiences,
lives, and world. Pedagogies of interpretation ask students to
situate their learning about pastoral care or nursing within their
own world. Seminary students who are learning in a particular
context are taught to consider themselves in relation to the
narrative tradition of their own religions and religious texts.
Interpretation occurs through dialogue between the text and
current and past practice communities. Interpretation includes
examining biblical and historical contexts, folk theologies,
biases, and societal injustices. For example, at one university, a
hermeneutics of suspicion exposes the reproduction of poverty
and marginalization of poor individuals. Interpretation is taught
in the prophetic work of liberation that leads to freedom from
bondage and injustice.
Critical thinking is of pedagogical concern to seminary
educators, just as it is to nurse educators. In seminaries, students
are challenged to respond to unexamined, inchoate
understandings of the sacred text and the religious tradition that
can be taken for granted by many people in that tradition.
March 2007, Vol. 46, No. 3
Students are also challenged to examine their own and others’
negative biases. For clergy, teaching critical thinking involves
“an apparent dichotomy between critical skepticism and
passionate engagement” (Foster et al., 2005, p. 94). The goal of
critical reflection is not to deconstruct the tradition and faith so
students have no place to stand and no way to act in concrete
situations. Instead, according to Foster et al. (2005): The end of
critical thinking is not reflective skepticism; it is to move students through
reflective skepticism to service, praxis, or some action responsive to the
influence or claim of the religious horizon on the interpretive practice.…
For example, while Lehman [a seminary educator] recognizes the value
of rational objectivity about the subject of one’s study or the ability to
distance oneself from the subject of inquiry in a stance of continuing
reflective skepticism, she also hopes her students will, “Become
passionately engaged in the dialogue with each other and the
commentaries of ancient rabbis.” (p. 95)
All professional educators face similar pedagogical challenges to
balance critical reflection and deconstruction with the ability to
passionately engage in practice. nurses, physicians, lawyers, and
engineers all have to have a place or tradition of practice that enables
them to stand, act, improve, and criticize. A self-improving practice
must allow professionals to critically reflect on the practice tradition
and science and technology.
However, action in particular situations is always demanded
of professional practitioners and requires more than
deconstruction and critique. not just any interpretation of the
science and technology in relation to a particular situation will
work. Grasping the nature of the particular situation is as
important as drawing on the most relevant scientific theory or
using the most up-to-date technology. To be freed from past
ignorance or oppression, professionals must also have a positive
project, a way to act faithfully in the situation. negative freedom
(“freedom from”) alone cannot create positive projects or ways
to act in the world. For example, nurses must have enough
confidence in their knowledge of the circulatory system and the
dynamics of the heart to distinguish between pump failure of the
heart and volume depletion that limits the amount of blood to be
pumped in a particular patient. Some “givens” are required for
judicious action. In nursing and medicine, these are the positive
projects of action that are based on well-founded knowledge.
Taken too literally, critical thinking demands that clergy and
nursing students question much of what is offered in their classes.
Without a place to stand in relation to tradition or past or current
learning in an area, there is no room for professional or pastoral
imagination to create positive and redemptive projects in the
world.
Current practice in nursing is based on past lessons,
experiential learning, and current science and technology.
Critical thinking, or the ability to question or be skeptical about
entrenched beliefs, habits, or social ideas, is a necessary
intellectual skill for nursing and all professionals, but it is not
sufficient for cumulative improvement, or acting in the world.
For that, engaged practical inquiry and action are needed in
relation to a practice tradition. It is here that nursing education
excels. nursing faculty expect their students to know the practical
“action step.” For example, it is not sufficient for nursing
students to recognize the oversedation of a patient with a narcotic
and to know that they may need the drug naloxone to reverse the
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condition; they must also know where to get the naloxone and
how to administer it.
Pedagogies of Formation
In Educating Clergy, Foster et al. (2005) use the term
formation, which is relevant for nursing and, indeed, all
professional education. A common taken-for-granted view of
professional identity is that it is a set of values, beliefs, and
“professions” that are held apart from what professionals do or
even know. In the Carnegie Foundation study, this was
articulated by a male nursing faculty member:
I think that the question, really, for me is about socialization,
which really means holding the values and the beliefs of the
profession. And so, the technology…becomes a, you know, that’s
one more distraction. But if you don’t really primarily really help
instill the values and the beliefs of the profession, you know,
you’re just being beholden to yet another distraction.
There will always be something in our way, but, I mean, primarily who
you are, what your identity is, and what grounds you, is really what
we…have to focus on.
This vision of professional socialization theorizes that students are
socialized into a coherent and fairly homogenous social status, role
performance, and set of class values. In the above statement, the
faculty member hopes that students will learn values that transcend
the technology and skilled performance of the nurse. Beliefs, values,
and attitudes, although central to professional identity, are the
conscious aspects of professional identity. In addition to values and
professional role socialization, nursing students and other
professional students also develop a less conscious and deliberate
“habitus” of practice (Bourdieu, 1990) that includes a growing set of
skills, expectations, and recognition from patients, other nurses, and
members of the health care team. For the clergy, the sets of skills and
practices that form identity and character also form perception,
skilled practices, and ways of being in the world. This stronger vision
of professional formation has much to teach all professionals because
it assumes that skills and practices, as well as attitudes, values, and
beliefs, constitute new possibilities for “seeing” events and
qualitative distinctions relevant to members of the clergy, as well as
new ways of being and acting in the world.
In the tradition of technical professionalism, professional
educators use terms such as socialization, role-playing, and role
taking to discuss the identity, character, and skill development of
professionals. It is here that Educating Clergy (Foster et al., 2005)
provides a much needed, richer language, particularly for the studies
of nursing and medicine. Socialization into a set of norms, values,
and styles of interaction and comportment cannot account for the
constitutive and worldtransforming nature of learning the skills,
habits, and practices of a profession. Socialization may cover the
structure, function, and process of learning a role, but it is silent on
the constitutive content of the skills and knowledge of a professional
practice. Learning the skills of a practice include learning new
perceptual acuities so the practitioners learn to see and notice events
and signs they could not recognize before their education. Skilled
know-how provides a new set of possible ways for the nurse or
student to understand and respond to patients. new practitioners are
developing a new habitus, which is formed by new taken-for-granted
meanings, skills, judgment capacities, and perceptual acuities.
Gradually, this new habitus enables students’ engagement in the
situation to be so attuned that they respond as nurses, rather than
performing tasks, following procedures, or acting like nurses.
106
Students develop new senses of salience and ways to respond, relate,
and perform in particular situations. By salience we mean some
aspects of a situation just stand out as more or less important. The
following excerpt, shared in the Carnegie Foundation study,
describes experiential learning about the responsibility of the
professional nurse to always make her own assessments and
exemplifies this strong constitutive vision (Taylor, 1995) of
professional formation:
I walked into the nursery, and there was a nurse there who said,
“Oh, don’t worry about that baby. I just assessed her, and everything’s
fine.” And I remember standing there thinking, oh, good. But then I
said, I can’t do that, you know, I can’t do that, and you can’t do that.…
I opened up the blanket and looked in, and sure enough, the baby was
tachycardic, flaccid, and cold. That’s the day I realized the awesome
responsibility to do our job because that baby was then placed in the
incubator and intensive care and was there for at least a week. And I’m
thinking how many hours would it have been ’til somebody had
actually, you know, discovered the baby’s condition—I think that’s the
day I realized that you never—, you are responsible. I don’t care if
somebody else has that assignment. If you have anything to do with
that patient you’re responsible.
The transformation from the perspective of a lay outsider to that
of a skillful member-participant in a practice requires actual
experiences that change the capacity to act in complex situations, as
well as character skill formation that enables nurses to respond and
relate to people who are vulnerable and in need. The actions and
responsibilities of being a nurse forms a habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) of
perceptual capacities, a sense of salience, skills, expectations, and
ways to act, which literally get sedimented into the skillful embodied
know-how of practitioners (Merleau-Ponty, 1969). Such a habitus
enables nursing students to generate actions that “can be adapted to
their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or
an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain
them” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). Students learn the skills of perception
and action and form what Merleau-Ponty (1969) called a style of
comportment in which students learn to adjust to the solicitations and
possibilities of the particular situation. Formation, in the end, requires
embodied intentionality and embodied identity, guided by notions of
best practice or what is best for the patient and family in the particular
situation. Practice demands, resources available, and possibilities that
present themselves in practice form the way nurses are able to
practice in a particular health care setting.
Institutions must be fit for good formation of practitioners and for
good practice. Practice setting demands, resources, and constraints
are the conditions that dictate the possibilities for good nursing
practice. To practice as a nurse in a community of practitioners gives
the both students and nurses concrete content in the form of
understandings and shared meanings. Practice setting demands,
resources, and constraints also reveal new aspects of the world of
nursing practice. Taking up a practice forms the practitioner and then
provides concrete content in the way of understandings and shared
meanings.
This view of formation, where nurses or clergy are constituted by
experiences from practice, differs from the romantic tradition of
expressive individualism in which shared practices present potential
hazards that may block or interfere with one’s self-discovery or self-
expression as a unique work of art (Taylor, 1992). From a formation
view, the practice itself gives new content, identity, and artfulness to
the person. When formation is effective as an ongoing project, the
person continues to develop vision, discernment, and innovation in
the practice. This vision and discernment that Foster et al. (2005)
Journal of Nursing Education
called pastoral imagination focuses on situated possibilities in the
practice community.
BEnnEr & SUTPHEn
Pedagogies of Contextualization
Foster et al. (2005) showed that even in religious traditions,
knowledge is situated. Attunement and discernment come only
within an understanding of and relationship to the local context
and the historical context of sacred text. All practices occur in
particular situations, in which the historical, social, and
institutional factors help create the context of that practice.
Excellent practice both shapes and is shaped by context. This is
what limits the scientific strategies of decontextualization and
generalization in the actual practice of ministry, doctoring, and
nursing. Practitioners must be able to perceive which aspects of
professional knowledge and skill are relevant to the particular
situation and recognize the changing relevance of facts and
formal theory as the situation unfolds and changes over time.
Thus, practice calls for practical reasoning, or reasoning about a
patient in a particular situation, although practitioners may use
science. One nursing faculty member revealed in the Carnegie
Foundation study how she tries to teach her students to discern
what is at stake for the patient:
[I am] trying to show them what’s at stake and then ask them,
what do you think we should be paying attention to? And I think
that sort of gets at the character development. These are the
questions that you should be asking, and these are the concerns
that you should have, and this is the response that those concerns
should generate. This understanding of the patient’s situation
should develop in you, this response. And I think that what that
says to me is that this is trying to develop a habit of thinking in
them that’s patient focused and focused on what’s at stake.
Students are asked to act according to the context or situation,
not simply behave as though they can impose their will on inert
circumstances. The agent (in this case, students) must be attuned
and responsive to the demands, risks, possibilities, and resources
of the particular context. radical freedom is a myth, just as a
monological observer standing over an objective situation is a
myth. Practitioners have no choice but to be member-participants,
situated within the particular context. This is the source of the
capacity for appropriate response to what is at stake and for
appropriate humility in an underdetermined situation, one that
demands that practitioners stay curious or be willing to be
corrected. Within contextual boundaries, practitioners find their
limits but also their possibilities to act, and even transform
contexts.
Pedagogies of Performance
Professional performance is also situated. Like clergy, nurses
learn to be present and to bear witness to human events. One
student described the following when she performed the
necessary assessments and skills during a birth:
It was awesome. Just to experience that with her, to see a baby
being born in the first place, it’s like new life. Who gets to
experience this in their life? no one. nurses do, you know. And that
was my first real patient. It was really cool, and then I got to assess
the baby right then. I got to catch the baby, for one, assess the baby
and then give it to her [the mothers], which was like: “Here’s the
March 2007, Vol. 46, No. 3
new life you brought into being.” That was really cool. And then
the next day, I took care of her on the mother/baby unit, which is
for recovering, and the husband and wife were like, “Oh, oh, we’re
so glad you are here.”... They were glad to see me, saying, “Oh,
thank you so much for taking good care of us—look, look at the
baby. Did you see the baby?...
They’re just telling me all this stuff, and I’m like yeah!
Integral to this experience is the nursing student’s competent
performance of the practice of coaching the mother and father
through labor and delivery and then catching the baby and
assessing its physical health. The performance is integrated in
that the student is able to bear witness to the birth of the new life,
while performing the skill tasks of being a nurse. Performance is
embodied.
Performance also requires situated action. Foster et al. (2005)
suggested that, “clergy educators prepare students to perform
their religious traditions as ways of living into or embodying the
activity of God in the present moment and place” (p. 170). So,
too, for nurses. The practice of the nurse in the above example of
attending a birth has its parallel in the religious tradition of the
compassionate stranger. The Good Samaritan who stops and
helps although the one needing help is not friend or kin.
Performance brings with it knowledge and skills that are not
always easily captured in words because performance occurs in
a particular context, depends on interpretation and understanding
in action, and requires wellformed practitioners with embodied
know-how. This is part of the mystery of excellent practice. As
Polanyi (1958) noted, expert practitioners always knows more
than they can tell. Similarly, Claxton asserted that virtuosity
“embodies observations, distinctions, feelings, perceptual
patterns, and nuances that are too fine grained to be caught in a
web of words” (as cited in Foster et al., 2005, p. 174).
Foster et al. (2005) observed that:
The students are enacting—sometimes awkwardly—the
integrative, discerning, often intuitive and complex imagination at the
heart of the clergy, as that comes down to the very practical embodiment
of theory and theology in concrete decisions, concrete actions and
concrete performances.” (p. 175) This is the heart of all professional
education, but it rings particularly true in the clergy and nursing
in which practitioners must consider the human experience of
falling ill in the context of a particular person’s life world and
within that person’s particular set of concerns and relationships.
Clergy and nursing hold in common professional practices
that are concerned with the person-family-community in
particular life worlds and specific situations. Commonly used
objectifying or decontextualizing strategies that “deworld” the
person, or allow the illusion that the practitioner and patient are
not bound in a particular situation, can never address particular
people suspended in a web of relationships and concerns inherent
to specific situations. Objectification frames people as separate
and able to be separated from their life worlds (i.e., their
relationships of concern and connections that constitute them,
their possibilities, resources, and constraints). Objectification is
useful in science and in many aspects of health care practice,
such as surgery and randomly controlled trials, but nurses and
clergy must be able to understand the person in his or her
particular life world and context. Decontextualization or
objectification can serve only in specific circumstances and with
specific techniques; however, in the end, nurses or clergy must
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understand people in their own worlds, which are embedded in a
specific set of circumstances and have certain concerns.

SuMMARy

nursing education, like clergy education, needs practices and

pedagogies of interpretation, formation, contextualization, and
performance. Situated, discerning action in the world requires this
broader version of rationality, relationship, understanding, and
interpretation. This is tacitly understood in nursing practice but
seldom acknowledged. nurse educators most often focus on a linear
problem-solving process, one that exemplifies a narrow, technical
rationality. It is here that reading about clergy education and
comparing it to nursing education might be liberating for nurse
educators. When concerned with recovery and coping with the
human experience of illness, nurses focus on patients’ life worlds—
their families, communities, and the concerns that organize their
lives. To do this, a broader view of rationality is needed. After all,
giving birth, recovering from injury or acute illness, coping with
chronic illnesses, and approaching death are all deeply embedded in
people’s life worlds and cannot be adequately addressed by a narrow,
technical rationality.

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108 Journal of Nursing Education