Confronting the Social Mandate for Nursing Scholarship – One School of Nursing’s Journey

For nursing students

Study summary

This article is different from most research papers you'll read in nursing school. It isn't a study with participants and data — it's a reflective account written by three nursing faculty members at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, British Columbia. The authors look back on 40 years of institutional change and ask a big question: what does "scholarship" mean for nursing faculty, and how do you build it, when your school isn't a large research university?

TRU's nursing program has quite a history. It started as a hospital diploma program, then became a two-year community college program in 1973. In 1989, the BC government pushed to expand access to university-level nursing education, and TRU joined a multi-institution partnership called the Collaborative Nursing Program of British Columbia (CNP), which eventually included 11 institutions. Through the CNP, TRU offered its first four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) in 1992. The school became part of University College of the Cariboo in 1996, when it granted its first nursing degrees, and finally, in 2004, the BC government made it Thompson Rivers University, a full university.

Each of these transitions changed what was expected of faculty. As a community college, instructors focused almost entirely on teaching students for hospital practice. As the school moved toward degree-granting and university status, faculty faced growing pressure to also produce "scholarship" — the kind of research, writing, and knowledge-building that universities need for national accreditation, and that faculty need for promotion and tenure.

To figure out what scholarship should look like in a teaching-focused school, TRU and its CNP partners drew on Ernest Boyer's (1990) well-known model, which says scholarship isn't just about discovering new facts through research. It also includes the scholarship of teaching, of integrating knowledge across fields, and of applying knowledge to real problems. The Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN) built this four-part model into its national definition of scholarship, which nursing programs must now demonstrate to keep their accreditation.

TRU's faculty also adapted six standards from Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) to judge whether scholarly work was rigorous — things like whether it was well-prepared, communicated to others through peer review, and led to a real contribution or new understanding. This gave faculty who weren't traditional researchers, but who were doing serious work in teaching, community health, or policy, a way to have that work recognized as legitimate scholarship.

The authors describe some growing pains along the way. Early on, only a minority of faculty were given "scholarly activity positions" with lighter teaching loads to pursue scholarship, which created a sense of inequity among colleagues who didn't get that time. Since 2009, TRU has used a promotion and tenure system with two parallel tracks: a "bi-partite" stream (teaching and service) and a "tri-partite" stream (teaching, service, and research), so faculty can build a career path that fits their strengths and workload. At the time of writing, two faculty had reached the rank of Associate Professor in the tri-partite stream, and eight had reached Senior Lecturer.

The authors also flag a real concern: many of TRU's most experienced scholars, the ones who built this culture from nothing, are approaching retirement. They argue this makes mentoring new faculty and helping them access strong doctoral programs an urgent priority, not just for TRU, but for nursing schools across Canada facing similar faculty shortages.

For nursing students, this paper is a useful window into how academic nursing actually works behind the scenes. Since only about 30% of nursing faculty across Canada hold permanent positions, and over a third of those are past age 50, the profession is facing real workforce pressure at the very level that trains new nurses. Understanding how a school like TRU built its scholarship culture — through committees, mentorship, flexible promotion tracks, and partnerships with other institutions — shows that a career in nursing education is possible outside major research universities, and that "scholarship" can take many valuable forms beyond traditional lab-style research.

For educators

Teaching and appraisal notes

This paper by Duncan, Mahara, and Holmes (2014), published in Quality Advancement in Nursing Education, is a reflective, narrative case account rather than an empirical study — worth flagging explicitly with students and junior faculty who are learning to distinguish research designs. There is no sample, data collection, or analysis plan; instead, the authors, all TRU faculty, offer an insider retrospective on 40 years of institutional transition: from a hospital diploma program to a community college program (1973), to a partner in the Collaborative Nursing Program of British Columbia (CNP, from 1989), to University College of the Cariboo (first nursing degrees, 1996), and finally to Thompson Rivers University (2004).

For appraisal purposes, this piece functions as institutional case history and position paper, closer to expert opinion or reflective-practice literature than to primary research. It is valuable for what it documents concretely — institutional dates, structures, and policies — but should be read with attention to authorial position: the writers were architects of much of what they describe, so the account foregrounds the framings that justify the choices made.

The theoretical backbone is Boyer's (1990) four-dimension model of scholarship (discovery, teaching, integration, application), which CASN has built into national accreditation expectations. The most transferable contribution is the authors' description of the CNP Scholarship Committee's adaptation of Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff's (1997) six standards, used to legitimate non-traditional scholarly output (teaching innovation, policy analysis, community dissemination) with the same rigor expected of discovery research. This is directly useful for programs building promotion and tenure criteria in teaching-intensive institutions, and pairs well with CASN's 2013 scholarship position statement for a session on scholarship typologies.

Discussion-worthy tensions to raise with students or faculty include: the equity implications of "scholarly activity positions" that gave some faculty course release while others received none; the bi-partite/tri-partite promotion and tenure structure adopted in 2009 as a compromise between full research expectations and teaching-centered realities; and the cited national data (only about 30% of Canadian nursing faculty hold permanent positions, and 38% of those are over age 50) that frames the urgency of faculty renewal as a program-sustainability issue, not just an individual one.

For classroom use, this article works well in graduate nursing education, health-professions education, or academic leadership courses to illustrate how scholarship frameworks translate into concrete institutional policy — committees, newsletters, mentoring seminars, promotion criteria — rather than remaining abstract. Instructors should pair it with a critical discussion of self-report bias in reflective case writing, and invite comparison against their own institution's scholarship expectations, especially in colleges or teaching-focused universities facing similar tensions between educational mandate and disciplinary research demands. The absence of comparative or empirical outcome measures (publication counts over time, funding growth, faculty retention rates) is a clear opportunity for follow-up empirical research building on this narrative foundation.