Abstract: Explores the challenges encountered by nurse educators who seek to assess aspects related to emotional competence in nursing students. This emotional competence includes nurses managing their own emotional life along with the skill to relate effectively to the multiple colleagues and agencies that nurses work alongside. The research was designed to explore the views of nurse educators about the challenges they encounter when seeking to assess a student's development of emotional competence during the three year bachelor of nursing degree. Focus groups were used to obtain from educators evidence of feeling and opinion as to how theory and practice environments influence student nurses' development of emotional competence. The process of thematic analysis was utilised and three key themes arose as areas of importance to the participants. These were personal and social competence collectively comprises emotional competence in nursing; emotional competence is a key component of fitness to practise; and transforming caring into practice. The findings of the study indicate a need for definition of what emotional competence is in nursing. It is argued that educators and practicing nurses, who work alongside students, must uphold the expectation that emotional competence is a requisite ability and should themselves be able to role model emotionally competent communication.

Abstract: Computerised technology has become a way of life. As nurse graduates enter a computer driven health care system we have a responsibility as nurse educators to ensure that they are computer familiar as borne out by the recent discussion papers released by the Nursing Council of New Zealand (2000a), which define the requirements for the practitioner of the future. Concurrently there is a call from the discipline of nursing for practitioners who have a form of knowledge that will bring about change within the socio-political context of the discipline as an outcome of critically reflective knowledge skills. Jurgen Habermas' (1971) treatise on knowledge and human interests, which offers a multi-paradigmatic approach to three forms of knowledge culminating in the emancipatory form provides a conceptual framework for many under-graduate pre-registration nursing curricular in Aotearoa-New Zealand. This thesis explores the author's ideas about contemporary undergraduate pre-registration nursing preparation in Aotearoa-New Zealand, associated knowledge outcomes, and the consequent links with contemporary computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies. It positions a framework for integrating CMC technologies and the action of critically reflective practice as a learning journey. The framework is hypothetical and pragmatic. It emerges from the exploration of the thesis and is posited as a way toward integrating CMC technologies within extant undergraduate pre-registration nursing curricular in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The learning journey is comprised of three dimensions, learning-for-practice, learning-from-practice and learning-with-practice and draws on four different cyber constructs: being, knowing, relating and dialoguing. Knowing, relating and dialoguing are ontological positions taken in relation to being. The learning journey sustains some derivation from Habermasian (1971) based conceptual framework. There is a need for nurse educators to consider this in relation to contemporary CMC technologies. The author hope that this framework will serve those with an interest in nurse education and who are interested in a future using CMC technologies within the realities of nursing practice and education.