Diversity Digest Newsletter: Fall 2022

 

Ron & Kathy Assaf College of Nursing, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Myers, Florida

As nursing faculty, we bear responsibility for creating a supportive learning experience for all nursing students. We have control over the classroom, skills lab, and simulation. We create our student learning objectives, curriculum, and assessment procedures. We make our classrooms places where students come to transform themselves into nurses. However, we cannot do it alone – as a large proportion of time as a nursing student is spent in the clinical setting. In addition to their clinical instructor, students interact with the staff at their clinical sites. Researchers have found that those interactions are sometimes difficult for students, especially for students who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) (Salamonson et al., 2019). 

 

When students cannot communicate proficiently in English or misunderstand the student role in a hospital setting, they risk being shunned by staff and missing clinical learning opportunities (Hagvquist et al., 2020). A CALD student once said she felt disrespected by nurses because of not speaking English fluently. She said, "I think language doesn't define knowledge. We speak another language, like that's all, like if she speaks [to] me in my language, I would sound knowledgeable. I want them to know that language doesn't define how my mind is."

 

 

 

 

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