Abstract
M.Cur. (Professional Nursing Science: Nursing Education)
The Nursing Strategy for South Africa calls for nursing colleges to increase the intake of new nursing students by 25% without the proportional increase of nurse educators. This has created an unacceptable increase in the number of nursing students leading to increased workload of nurse educators. Other compounding problems that relate to classroom teaching, clinical, personal and organization, hinder performance and contribute to the frustration of the nurse educator. The purpose of this study is to explore and describe the factors influencing nurse educators’ teaching and learning performance at a nursing college in Gauteng in order to develop supporting strategies to improve their performance in teaching and learning. The research design is qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual in nature. A non-probability purposive sampling method was used to select a sample of 12 nurse educators to participate in individual semi-structured interviews. A qualitative open coding data analysis method was used.
To ensure the trustworthiness of the study, the researcher used Lincoln and Guba’s four criteria and strategies of establishing the trustworthiness of qualitative data namely credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. Four main themes and sub-themes emerged as follows: (1) Large student numbers - difficulty in recognizing students as individuals and identifying ‘at-risk’ students, difficulty in managing a large class, concerns about quality of nursing students in a large class, content-delivery process is a challenge in a large class; (2) Language and cultural barriers - language barrier and diverse cultural groups of students in one class; (3) Competence of nurse educators - inadequate knowledge / subject didactics, ineffective skills and negative attitude and inappropriate values; and (4) Ineffective management practices - inadequate orientation and mentoring and lack of human and material resources. The themes and sub-themes were conceptualized within the relevant literature and supporting strategies to improve nurse educators’ teaching and learning performance were described. Recommendations were made with regard to nursing education, nursing practice and nursing research.