By: Susan Gross Forneris, PhD, RN, CNE, CHSE-A, FAAN
Welcome to Nursing EDge – our new NLN blog!
For those of you unfamiliar with the NLN blog, we welcome you and hope that you will find our conversations insightful and edgy. We especially hope they motivate you to explore and try on something new, to excel in your many roles as a nurse educator.
For those of you who have been here before, expecting to see the familiar NLN TEQBlog logo, you will see that we have engaged in rebranding. Let me tell you why.
Dedicated to excellence in nursing, the National League for Nursing is the premier organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education. Our mission is to promote excellence in nursing education to build a strong and diverse nursing workforce to advance the health of our nation and the global community. Similarly, the mission of the NLN Center for Innovation in Education Excellence is to cultivate, scale, and impact excellence and innovation in nursing education to meet the needs of contemporary learners across the discipline of nursing.
The goal of our rebranded blog is just that, to promote and provide resources that foster faculty excellence! Nursing EDge dares to explore new territory while working toward the transformation of nursing education.
We chose the word EDge to both symbolically and graphically communicate the work we are doing. Work that will stretch the boundaries of our imagination and abilities as we reframe how nursing students are taught and how our graduates engage with patients and their caregivers in this digital age of health care. As nurse educators, we must engage the fundamental shift from teaching students contentto teaching them how to use the content. This requires us to be open to innovation — innovation that brings us to the Edge: to the EDge of employing new technologies, new strategies, new frontiers in knowledge development and use.
Casually Google the word edge. You will find that other search terms emerge, like cutting edge and bleeding edge. These terms are not new, but I love how they are differentiated. Myers Barnes Associates (2017) describes cutting edge as “that part of the knife that does most of the work.” That makes sense when you think about developing or operationalizing innovative teaching strategies and how hard it is to make that first cut, how hard it is to create that edge and take the dive. Yet, Myers Barnes suggests that cutting edge is not about innovation. Rather, breaking boundaries not yet broken is at the heart of innovation, that is, the bleeding edge.
Interesting! The nature of bleeding-edge innovation is the use of daring ingenuity. It is about daring to explore new territory regardless of the outcome. This is at the heart of the NLN core value of Excellence (NLN, n.d.)
Please enjoy and embrace our Nursing EDge blog as we bring together collaborative expertise across the nursing discipline, to explore, define, and co-create, with daring ingenuity, faculty development initiatives for our contemporary generation of learners. Let’s take the risk and dive in together. Join with the NLN Center for Innovation in Education Excellence and embrace the bleeding edge, the NLN Nursing EDge, together!
References
Myers Barnes Associates (2017, June 9). Are you on the cutting edge or bleeding edge? https://www.myersbarnes.com/blog/2017/06/are-you-on-the-cutting-edge-or-the-bleeding-edge/
National League for Nursing (n.d.), Core values. http://www.nln.org/about/core-values
Great! I love it. Thanks for your important work.