Intervention Three: Require Oral Presentations on Images of Nursing.

Oral presentations hold great potential as a way to integrate popular culture into nursing education. As with the hypertextual writing assignment suggested above, this pedagogical intervention seeks to help students by modeling critical responses to popular media, a degree of intellectual development our research shows some students will not have. A student, for instance, might bring in a scene from ER where a nurse is depicted in a controversial way, show it to the class, summarize its potential influence, call for a freewrite about it, and then begin a group discussion of its character and implications. The students, then, are not just talking about an image of nursing in popular culture, but also the nature of nursing as a profession and how they may imagine themselves as future professionals in the field.