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Nursing education, as with professionalization projects, is fraught with epistemicide, false separations, and a focus on expertise over relations and accountability. This is a critical reflection of the first 5 years of a four‐semester prelicensure Community Engagement course series. As the course lead, I have consistently initiated adjustments, based on experiences teaching multiple sections and synthesizing comments and feedback from students and faculty, with an eye toward longstanding and pressing concerns in the world around us. Two broad epistemic arrangements emerge from this critical excavation: (1) naturalized hierarchy, false separations, and appraisals of relevance and (2) relationality and reflection as unsettling. There is a need for sustained collective examination and shift in how the nursing education and healthcare industries curate the meanings and practice of "community," "health," and "nursing," peering out from the regulatory oversight of neoliberal forces. How might we situate student progression, program implementation, institutional contracts, and curricular standards within the contexts of nursing programs' responsibilities to local communities in light of unfolding events locally and globally and their historical antecedents? How are we all, as faculty, disrupting siloes, false separations, and the contradictions of professionalism and the biomedical model to intentionally advance health equity? May we continue to illuminate the presence of community as being everywhere, not merely in juxtaposition to acute care. May we unsettle the prevailing theorization and practices of community throughout nursing education and commit to imagining and practicing relational praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American institutions of nursing education have integrated cultural competence as a pillar approach to addressing health disparities. The theoretical frameworks, priorities, and solutions that national organizations pursue and endorse have far-reaching implications. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) is one such organization. The purpose of this project was to critically analyze the AACN's Tool Kit of Resources for Cultural Competent Education for Baccalaureate Nurses to excavate dynamics related to language, power, and inequality. Findings of this critical discourse analysis indicate: (1) the centrality of the AACN's assumed authority and lack of relationality with readers, (2) nursing insularity and narrow theorization of culture and power, and (3) the harm of whiteness and colonialism as pedagogy. Accountability and repair include transparency, taking note of resources and viewpoints available and endorsed on organization websites, and updating (or refuting) outdated and harmful approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, health professional organizations have recommended increased diversity in the workforce and education. To address persistent inequities in health care, the racial composition of the nursing workforce needs be congruent with the U.S. population. Without first addressing structural inequity in nursing education programs, the nursing profession cannot begin to address structural racism in health care. The lack of nursing student diversity is reflective of barriers in program admissions. This article is a call to nursing accreditation bodies to operationalize anti-racism to improve U.S. nursing workforce diversity by introducing accountability structures that require evidence-based holistic admission review and analysis of admission data to ensure that student cohorts are diverse across nursing programs, thereby ensuring a future workforce that reflects the diversity of the U.S. population., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (© Alicia Swartz et al., 2024; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.)

The nursing profession can both perpetuate inequities and elevate the discourse around disability. Our article uses an intersectional lens to discuss the scope, magnitude, and determinants of health inequities that people with disabilities experience and the ways in which theoretical models of disability used in nursing education can further contribute to inequities. Our article makes the case for an intersectional social justice approach to nursing education by contextualizing the current state of affairs within historical and contemporary models of disability. This has the potential to be a revolutionary leap toward promoting health equity and upholding the Code of Ethics.