Abstract: This study traces the author's transition from being a mental health nurse to becoming a facilitator of an education programme, the Health and Wellbeing course, for those in recovery from mental illnesses. Within this transition, she describes a journey from disease-focused paradigms toward emancipatory paradigms, evidenced by her application of the recovery approach to her teaching. The 'recovery approach' proposed by the Mental Health Commission in November 1998, and other models of health, are explored using the methodology of descriptive/interpretive philosophical inquiry, autobiographical narrative and a dialectical research design. The author draws from the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism to present excerpts from her journals, exemplars, poetry and artwork which illuminate epiphanies occurring as she integrates health paradigms in the design of the Health and Wellbeing course. Within this process the recovery approach is revealed as being consistent with the teaching principles of the Health and Wellbeing course. The author goes on to say that the dialectical research design reveals paradoxes and transformations in nursing, medical, psychological, and humanistic paradigms within the New Zealand socio-political context from the 1970s to 2003. The way these are integrated into her practice as an educator, becomes evident in the dialectical research cycles of being, thinking, developing a project, the encounter of teaching, making sense and communication. These cycles reveal her being in the roles of nurse and educator and the thinking through of paradigms that lead to the design and philosophy of a Health and Wellbeing course, the encounter of teaching, and the communication of insights gained. The author's main objective is to show the importance of nurses and educators developing a reflective consciousness when working with sufferers of mental illness. This reflective consciousness involves three levels: The primary level, or raw experience; the social level, or our socio-political contexts and social values, and, the realised level, insights gained about knowledge and experience.

Abstract: The intention of this heuristic study was to explore and discover the essence of the positive influence of the natural environment on the human spirit. The study quest was identified as a central concern that evolved from the author's personal experience of spiritual awakening in the natural environment and an interest in the concept of connectedness in nursing care and practice. The study also focused on the self of the nurse and the qualities of holistic nursing care. Guided by heuristic methodology developed by Moustakas (1990) the thesis traces a journey of discovery. Using conversational interviews, six nurses were asked to describe their experiences of their spirit being positively influenced in the natural environment. These nurses were also asked if these beneficial experiences had any flow-on effect to their nursing practice. From these interviews various commonalities of experience were identified as well as some experiences unique to the individual participants. The participant knowing was articulated using Reed's (1992) dimensions of relatedness in spirituality as a framework. Reed describes these dimensions as being able to be experienced intrapersonally, interpersonally and transpersonally. A substantive body of nursing and non-nursing literature was explored to support the participant knowing and provide strength to the discussion. The study discovered that the human spirit is positively influenced in the natural environment. The three actions of personal healing and wellbeing in the natural environment, knowing self – knowing others and sustaining self in nursing practice were valued by the participants as contributing to the quality of their nursing care. In bringing together spirituality, the natural environment and nursing, holism was discovered to be the significant and connecting constituent. The study has some implications for the discipline of nursing that are also discussed by the author.

Abstract: This study examines the discursive formation of professional nursing in one country, as revealed by the history of nursing in New Zealand. Michel Foucault's approach to historical research signifies a different level of analysis from conventional approaches, focusing not on the history of ideas but on an understanding of the present, a history of the present. A genealogical method derived from Foucauldian poststructuralism reveals how different understandings of nursing have occurred and have governed nursing practices and scholarship in different historical contexts. The archaeological investigation in this study reveals two moments of epistemic transformation, that is, two intervals of mutation and discontinuity. The Nightingale era in the 1880s precipitated the first epistemic shift – premodernism to modernism. The transfer of nursing education from hospital based training to the tertiary education sector, followed by the introduction of the baccalaureate degree, precipitated the second epistemic shift in the 1990s, the advent of postmodernism. Encompassing these two epistemes, six historical contexts are identified, where significant disruptions to the nursing discourses overturned previously held assumptions about what constituted a nurse. Each historical context is identified by specific discursive constructs. The first is colonial caring, the second the Nightingale ethos and the third heroic, disciplined obedience. In the fourth context, nursing is framed by, and within, discourses of skilled, humanistic caring, in the fifth, scientific, task focused managerialism, and in the 1990s, the sixth context, by multiple realities in an age of uncertainty.