View Nursing Education of E Jane Martin

Nursing Education Concept By E Jane Martin

Who is E Jane Martin,Professional Journey,Growing Interest in Teaching,Readiness For Teaching,Mentoring For Teaching,Level Comfortable As A Teacher,Challenges,Embarrassing Teaching Moments,Rewarding Aspects,Least Rewarding Aspects,Excellence In Teaching,Advice For Teachers

Who is E Jane Martin

    Dr E. Jane Martin is Professor and Dean of the School of Nursing at West Virginia University Dr. Martin earned a diploma in nursing from Mercy Hospital, a BSN Ed from West Virginia University, an MA in English from The Ohio State University, and an MN in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing and a PhD in Higher Education from the University of Pittsburgh. 

    She has postgraduate education in administration, mind body medicine, and integrative cancer care. 

    Dr Martin is an experienced educator, having taught for over 30 years at the master's and doctoral levels. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing Dr. Martin is as an evaluator and trainer for the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) and a deans' representative on the Accreditation Review Committee. 

    She is also an elected member of the National Academies of Practice in Nursing and was a founding member of the American Holistic Nursing Association. Dr Martin received the Distinguished Alumnus Award at the University of Pittsburgh. She served as editor of the Journal of Holistic Nursing.

Professional Journey

    Dr E.J Martin began her career in education by teaching English composition to undergraduate students. However, she chose to be an educator in nursing rather than in English and believes that being a teacher is a gift that has many rewards. 

    Her career in teaching has been shaped by outstanding teachers, preparation in education and administration, and the challenge of finding balance in life.

Growing Interest in Teaching

    Although she was very aware in high school of what good teaching was and what it was not, it did not occur to me that teaching would be the path she would take. After high school she had a scholarship offer to go to a small college in Pennsylvania to become an art teacher. 

    Her art teacher had set it up without her input; it surprised her. She had no intention of doing such a thing. and when a person from the college talked to me about it, she said to him, most indignantly, she am going to be a nurse. 

    Her high school teacher laughed afterwards and told me that she certainly set him straight. So, it had not occurred to me at that time that she wanted to be a teacher.

    When she came to West Virginia University to do her bachelor's degree, the program for registered nurses was in the College of Arts and Sciences. Once in the program, she became very enamored while reconnecting with literature; she had loved it in high school.

    She took courses in arts and sciences and in English, so that she had an equivalent degree in English when she graduated with her nursing degree. Then she decided to pursue a master's in English at Ohio State University. There she received a Graduate Student Assistant (GSA) appointment and became a teacher overnight. 

    An unprepared one, she must say. Every GSA was expected to teach freshman composition, a three quarter sequence. There were thousands of students, so she taught three sections of freshman composition her first term in graduate school.she became a teacher the hard way.

    We were all required to use the same books, follow the same syllabus, and make the same assignments. The structure was helpful, but no one told us how to teach in the classroom. 

    So, she talked to people she knew who had some teaching experience, including her husband, who was a teacher.she got plenty of advice. her husband said, "Don't smile the first week," and then he said. "You can, perhaps, begin to smile a little bit the second week." 

    We met three times a week with the students. It really was a trial by fire.she wanted to do a good job, and having three sections of the same course meant that she had three opportunities each week to work on it.She learned from each session, and she also learned that each group was different. 

    Each group had its own personality. What worked in one group might not work in another in the same course.she also learned that first term what kind of trouble she could get into if she didn't have clear guidelines and rules. 

    In the first term, there was a lot of crisis intervention because she would be confronted with something and wouldn't be sure how to handle it.she learned from that first experience.she went into the second quarter and had a much better sense of being very clear about ground rules, expectations, and consequences when expectations were not met. 

    This helped a great deal to ease the turmoil of unhappy students. Each student wrote eight themes each quarter, and it was only a 10-week quarter. So they were writing from the get go, and she had to grade each one. It was important that the papers came in on time so she could get them back to the students in a timely fashion. 

    To complicate matters, she was taking six credits of graduate work, and she had two small children at home. It was an interesting life.she would talk with other people who were teaching and we would share stories about things that were happening

    She felt she really did acquire classroom teaching skills in the years teaching English at Ohio State. The first quarter focused on exposition explanatory writing. The second was use of logic, judgment, and reasoning in writing the third quarter was poetry, drama, and short stories.she loved the progression and learned about different types of writing, and how to help students work through the struggles of writing

Readiness For Teaching

    The first formal preparation was in her master's program;she took a three credit curriculum course and also had a teaching practicum. In her doctoral program, she took a curriculum course and developed a curriculum in nursing: she took an evaluation course and developed an instrument to evaluate teaching. 

    Every course she took, she brought back to nursing and made it fit.she would say most of her doctoral course work really did focus on education and enhanced her knowledge base and skills.

Mentoring For Teaching

    She have not had much formal mentoring. At Ohio State the director of the freshman program attempted to help. Probably the first person she could say really did mentor me was Dr. Marguerite Schaefer, who had been the Dean of Nursing at Pitt when she entered the master's program. After her deanship. 

    She took a yearlong sabbatical and worked on organizational theory at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) before joining the faculty in nursing administration. she took her courses in organization and management. She was absolutely an exquisite teacher who was incredibly respectful of students. 

    She would always start her classes by clearing the agenda for any issue that was troubling people before she went on with the content of the course.she wanted to be a teacher like her.she could talk to her, not so much about teaching, but about her life and her career goals. She gave me very good feedback on written assignments.

    She would say she was the major mentor she had in teaching. She modeled what she wanted to be. Although she was friendly and available, she wasn't someone who was your buddy, but someone you could talk to about issues and concerns as a teacher.

    After she completed her master's degree at Ohio State, she was hired as a lecturer while her husband was working on his PhD. At this time, our youngest daughter developed a stammering problem.

    She put her into speech therapy and the problem became worse, so she decided that what she needed was some time at home before she went to kindergarten, and she changed her teaching schedule. 

    Ohio State had just received funding for a New Careers Program for adults in the community who needed academic course work, including writing skills, to prepare them for new employment opportunities.she was able to shift to that program, so that she could be home in the day time with her daughter. 

    Then her husband would come home from his commitments, and she would leave and do mine. It actually worked perfectly. her daughter's stammering problem cleared up, and when she began children's garden, the teacher didn't even know she had ever had a problem. 

    Teaching those adult learners was a challenge, and she greatly expanded her teaching skills. They had to be treated differently, and she needed different approaches to help them be successful.

    She was careful to address these older students as Mr. or Mrs., and she helped them to understand that they knew more than they thought they knew. Most of them had had the benefit of a high school educational program that taught basic writing and grammar skills. 

    In fact, these older students often had better basic skills than many of the freshman students that she taught. But, they needed confidence and were frightened about coming back to college. 

    There was a tension between teaching them things they needed to know, and building on what they had already learned.she graded their papers differently, looked for different things in them, and tried to identify and emphasize their strengths. It seemed to work and was a very good experience for me.

    We left Ohio State when her husband graduated, and we moved to Pittsburgh.She taught literature the first year in a small liberal arts college. Again, it was a different experience.she was teaching all levels of students, not just freshman or not just adult learners. 

    While at this liberal arts college, she was a full fledged faculty member.she marched in ceremonies, participated in events at the college, and she liked it all very much.

    It occurred to me that she probably needed to get on with her education.She had a master's degree in English at that point, and she thought she had to either get a doctorate in English and continue in English, or, perhaps, return to nursing. 

    Her mother had always told me: “Being a nurse is like being a Catholic; once you are one, you are one the rest of your life, no matter what it is you are doing.” To her, she was a nurse teaching English;she was not an English teacher who used to be a nurse.

    She interviewed at the University of Pittsburgh in both the English Department and School of Nursing, and she decided that’s he would go back into nursing.she was fortunate to have funding, and she took classes on a full time schedule in psychiatric mental health nursing.she completed a second master's degree and went straight into the doctoral program. 

    That had been her intention when she went to Pitt. Following graduation with her master's, she was hired immediately on the faculty at Pitt.she taught the first term at the baccalaureate level, and then, because she had teaching experience, even though it was in English, they moved me to the master's level the second semester. 

    So although she began teaching in a different field, the skills that she had acquired were useful and appropriate. The new learning was in clinical teaching.she hadn't done that before. However, as a student she had learned quickly what things were helpful from the faculty. Students figure out who the good faculty are, and who the not-so-good ones are. 

    It seemed to me that the faculty who were good clinical teachers knew what they were doing because they also practice ticked . They were not hopelessly out of date. 

    So, she had decided that as a teacher, she would need to practice, and when she was interviewed for the position, she negotiated for time to practice as part of her workload.she saw patients at the nearby outpatient clinic and worked hours at the clinic around her teaching schedule. 

    Practice gave me a rich repertoire of examples and illustrations, and she was walking the path she was asking students to walk. Then she began working with students doing research at the master's level. Learning how to guide students with their theses was also a new experience. 

    Once she completed her own doctorate and became a member of the graduate faculty of the university, she moved on to doctoral teaching and worked closely with doctoral students through the whole curriculum.she found as she moved along in her teaching career that she began to do more presenting about teaching. 

    Her first publication was about teaching. It was application of a model in psychiatric nursing to teach psychiatric nursing students. 

    Then a friend and she coauthored an article about incorporating standards of care into psychiatric mental health teaching she became distressed about the multiple degrees that were offered in doctoral education in nursing that seemed to me to be only adding confusion.she was "on the stump" for a number of years to have the only doctoral degree in nursing be the PhD. 

    She wrote about it and presented at doctoral forums , but the PhD as the sole degree offered in nursing never happened.

Level Comfortable As A Teacher

    She think that by the third year of teaching at OSU, she was comfortable. By then she had learned that it was as much the student's responsibility to learn as it was her responsibility to teach, and she learned that in spite of planning and organizing, the perfect course could not occur. Flexibility was central to being successful.

Challenges

    The major challenge for me was the juggling of doing a good job in her teaching at the same time that she was either a student or faculty member and had a family to care for. 

    She realized when she was at Ohio State, that unless she was willing to sacrifice her family life,she could not be a 4.0 student.she was studying for a master's degree in a field in which she was a “newcomer”;she did not have the rich background in English that some of her fellow students had. 

    Many of the students were men, and school was their life's work. They had wives to take care of them, and they were very competitive.she had to make her peace with the fact that “Bs” were OK.she wasn't going to fail, but she just didn't have to get an “A” in every course. 

    As a GSA,she had to teach,she was learning to be a teacher,she had her children to care for, and her husband to support. So, it was a matter of doing some soul searching and realizing that’s he did not have to be perfect in everything. It was a valuable lesson for me.

    When she started her dissertation work, she enlisted her teenage children to help more at home. The girls would each take a turn cooking one night a week. Our agreement was that they would cook and we would eat, no matter what it was or how bad it was. 

    They did and we did. Incidentally, they are both wonderful cooks today. They also helped with some of the house hold chores. Asking for help was not always easy for me, but she learned to enlist other people's aid. 

    Also,she learned to say “no” to things that she would have liked to do but just didn't have the time for.she still have trouble with saying “no” today;she want to do it all and be involved in as much as humanly pita possible.

    Learning to prioritize what is important for me at that time.she figured out that she was a morning person; she does her best work in the morning. So she got up every morning at 4:00 AM to work on her dissertation.she would always write in red ink. 

    This was before computers, and to me the red ink was symbolic: it was blood.she was doing it, but it wasn't easy.she would write in the mornings until it was time to get the children up for school, and then after she came home from school and we had dinner, she would go back to the desk and would type what she had scribbled that morning.

    She knew that if she did not get it in a legible form, she would not know what she had written a week later. So, this became her routine for “grinding out the pieces” of the dissertation: getting up at 4:00 every morning and then trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour so she could get some sleep.

Embarrassing Teaching Moments

    When she was teaching English, she had some dental work that required me to have braces on her teeth. The advice from her husband was to go in and smile the first day. It was not a usual thing in the early 1960s for adults to have braces, but she did it, and she let them see the full mouth of wires and rubber bands, and we went on from there. 

    On one of the evaluations at the end of that term a student had written, "You are a very brave lady to appear in public like that." It was a compliment,she think. Another example, this one at Pitt when she was teaching in the master's program, is about a young student who had a baby and wanted to bring the baby to class. 

    Of course,she said she could.she learned later at the graduation celebration that the students were telling the story about one day when the baby began to fuss and the mother could not quiet the baby. 

    So, at some point, she went back to the mother who was trying to give the baby a bottle.she shook the bottle, nothing came out, and she said, "Perhaps if there were a hole in the nipple, the baby could drink."She meant it kindly, and we got a pin and made a hole. At graduation, they were teasing me saying, "Perhaps if there were a hole in the nipple."

    She do not know that she have ever been truly embarrassed in class.she think if you laugh at yourself, even if you do dumb things, it's not so embarrassing. It really makes you human, and that's OK.

Rewarding Aspects

    Probably one of the first rewards came when she was teaching at Ohio State. Many of the students were local farm kids and they did not have a very wide exposure to literature. 

    So, for many of them, this was the first time they had a sense of what poetry, theater, and good fiction was about.she remember one woman, in particular, had turned into a very long evaluation that she had brought to class with her (rather than doing it in class as was customary). 

    It was very moving, because she related that she had found in the work we had done that term new meaning and direction in her life. She was appreciative of the exposure and expected to continue to build on it. 

    It was a very rewarding type of evaluation because that is really what most teachers hope for. You want to think that you are making a difference, that you are helping students see things in a new way, or a way that helps them come to some better understanding of their lives.

    She learned that no statement is casual when you are a teacher. You never know what you say that a student will latch onto and that will sustain them. 

    Another example relates to two women who came from India to the program at the University of Pittsburgh, and we faculty thought they would be just great buddies, since they were two women coming together from the same country. 

    However, they were from different caste systems, so although they were together a lot, they were not good supports for one another because their cultures were very different. One of the women, in particular, had left a young child at home in India while she was in the program, and she suffered greatly because of it. 

    When she was ready to graduate, she brought me a beautiful piece of cloth with gold in it. It was just gorgeous.she thanked her and said that she really didn't need to do this. She said, "Oh, it's only because of you that I'm finishing." 

    And then she related that she had come to me once, asking if she thought she could to it, she was very unhappy and having great difficulty. She said, "You thought about it and then you said, she see no reason why you can't do this." 

    She further explained that every time would say to herself, “I cannot do this,” she would hear me say that there was no reason why she could not do it.

    She had told her that she could do it, and that was what sustained her.She is often amazed when she meet students later and they tell me that something she said to them had made such a difference. 

    As educators, we never truly know the full effect that we have on people. Education makes a difference in people's lives. It is a wonderful thing that we do, and a wonderful thing that we are engaged in. To me those are the rewards.

Least Rewarding Aspects

    Least rewarding times are the failure to connect with or reach a student who needs some help or guidance. Once in a great while, you just cannot reach a student. her psychiatric nursing education has been valuable to me, and sheam a better teacher because of that content. 

    Once in a while, though,she find myself personally reacting to something, and that's a perilous path-most of the time a lose-lose situation. Although rare, for me, those are the times that are least rewarding, when she have just not been there for someone who needed guidance or help and it just did not go as well as it should have

Excellence In Teaching

    She subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education and read it to stay away from issues in education.She attend seminars and programs about new directions in teaching.She is particularly interested in where the field is going, perhaps where it ought to be going.She maintain excellence through reading more than anything else.

Advice For Teachers

    She would say that the opportunity to be an educator is a great gift that has the potential to make a profound and lasting contribution in the lives of people. 

    It is important to approach the classroom with great courtesy and respect for every person present.shewould say being a little more formal is probably better than being too informal and buddy buddy with the students. 

    They don't need friends. They have friends. They need a faculty member who is a role model who can take them to a place where they have not been before.Shethink it is important to have your course carefully thought out. To have your expectations clear and at the same time, be flexible. 

    It is not easy to be flexible when you have thought it out and planned and you know where you are going. Knowing when to be flexible, and how you might then pick up the slack at another point in the course is a skill. It is always important to be fair and consistent.

    New teachers need to take time to write and talk about what they are doing and what they are learning as well as be open to new opportunities and experiences.she think one should take what sometimes might seem a different path, for a while, to see what might be found there.she cannot say that there has been one book that has been like a “bible” for me that she would recommend to new teachers.

    She recently purchased a copy of “Teacher” by Mark Edmondson. It is a story written by a student whose life was changed profoundly by a teacher who came to his high school. It is a wonderful book. It vividly captures what an impact a teacher can have.