Praksis- eller metode-orienterede ‘forandrings-agenter’?

En undersøgelse af diskurser i to forskellige bachelorforløb på sygeplejeuddannelsen

Resumé

This article examines the testing of a new bachelor program in nursing education (intervention program) aimed at increasing the integration between theory and practice in bachelor projects and harnessing the potential for contributing to practice development. Specifically, the purpose is to investigate which discourses about nursing are present in bachelor projects and the final examination in the intervention program compared to the regular program (control program). Based on this, the analysis explores how students' bachelor projects are constructed as agents of change for clinical practice. The empirical data consists of 12 bachelor projects and 12 observations of the final examination in both programs. Analytically, the methodological approach is inspired by critical discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that the two programs share the same types of discourses: scientific, caring, improvement, institutional, medical, and societal discourses. The difference lies in the weighting of the discourses and the way they are presented. Thus, the two programs are co-constitutive of two different forms of agents of change: the intervention program for a practice-oriented agent of change and the control program for a method-oriented potential agent of change. The latter is rewarded in the final examination for focusing on scientific discourse. Based on this, the article initiates a discussion on whether the discourse of change in the future should have as central a place as it does now, and, not least, how.