Nursing Teachers’ Experiences in a Constructivist Classroom

: a Case Study

Abstract

Care delivery by nurses has never been so challenging. Nurses, being the most abundant workforce of
professionals in healthcare sectors, are often regarded as prime supporters for an effective medical team.
The sophisticated clients’ presentations of illnesses together with the use of cutting-edge technologies
renders full devotion from nurses, both physically and mentally. Abilities in carrying out swift decisionmaking
with critical thinking mark the characteristics that are required of contemporary nurses.
Nursing education plays a pivotal role in nurturing nursing graduates with these qualities. Traditional
training of nurses at nursing schools of hospitals had been criticised for inadequately securing all-round
developments for nursing students. The transition of training of nurses to education of nursing students
at higher education institutions had been regarded as a positive leap of development of nursing graduates
that can survive the complex healthcare environments.
The global massification of higher education from early 1990s impacted the education of nursing
students in the higher education arena. With huge student loads and diminished faculty-to-students
ratios, didactic methods of teaching with positivist traditions became prevailing around global higher
education environments. Nursing education in Hong Kong had encountered similar teaching-focused
impacts. Students were fed with pre-set knowledge and skill sets while attention to individual learning
needs became minimal.
The awakening of learning-centred education in the past three decades raised the needs of nursing
faculty’s possession of pedagogic preparation while transforming from a clinician to an educator. Such
paradigmatic change is viewed as critical in steering nursing education from teaching-centred to
learning-centred. Constructivism, being rooted in interpretative tradition, had been becoming a
promising learning-centred pedagogic model to be adopted in higher education in the past few decades.
Through refocusing teachers’ epidemiological stances, constructivism promotes the incorporation of
learning-centred pedagogies for attending to the differential needs of students’ construction of
knowledge. Albeit the promises of constructivism in developing nursing students’ life-long learning
abilities, understanding of how teachers adopt this pedagogic model in their classes was yet to be clearly
revealed in literature. Many studies concentrated on students’ responses towards learning-centred
strategies while those describing teachers’ use of constructivist elements in classrooms was relatively
scarce.
This study was set in this background. It aimed to reveal the actual practices of nursing teachers’
adoption of constructivist elements in their classrooms in an undergraduate baccalaureate programme, as
well as their perception on this new endeavor. Six nursing teachers from a department of nursing of a
private university in Hong Kong were recruited after obtaining institutional and personal consents.
Their video-recorded tutorial classes on a course for graduating nursing students were reviewed for their
adoption of constructivist elements. Individual interviews were then arranged to solicit their perceptions
on these practices as well as their views on teaching with constructivism.
Findings on the constructivist practices adopted by the teachers included: Teachers as facilitators, Use of
authentic engaging materials, Use of Socratic style of communications, Challenging students, Allowing
students to explore and share information, and Catering for individual’s needs. Each practice was
contributed by two to four pedagogic activities observed. Four over-arching themes were identified
from reflexive analysis of individual interviews: Pedagogies in running a constructivist classroom,
Teachers’ perception on students’ responses, Value of teachers, and What to do with the Integrated
Nursing course. Each over-arching theme was supported with three to four subthemes.
This study revealed the dedicated efforts by the six nursing teachers in actualizing constructivist
elements in their classrooms. All of them agreed that adopting constructivism in nursing education is
challenging. Although students’ inertia in assuming more learning responsibilities was expected, it did
consume considerable amount of energy from the teachers while facilitating students’ construction of
knowledge for themselves. Additional resources, including faculty’s training as well as administrative
accommodation for course’s delivery in an already packed nursing programme, must be supported from
departmental level if adoption of this interpretive pedagogies was to be promoted in the future. This
study offered practical implications for stakeholders of nursing education in steering pedagogic reform
from teaching-centred to learning-centred directions in local contexts.

Date of Award	30 Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Sarah M Eagle (Supervisor) & Maria Tsapali (Supervisor)