Nursing education, constraints, and critical consciousness: the birth and death of a Modellversuch in West Germany

This study is an analysis of the social, political, and economic factors that affect nursing education in the Federal Republic of Germany. The analysis was carried out through the examination of a specific situation, that is, the implementation of a university-based, experimental program for nursing instructors at the Free University of Berlin from October 1976 through June 1982. The study is presented as a 'problem-posing' work to stimulate dialogue in the Federal Republic of Germany--and other countries--about the means and ends of nursing education and to outline a nursing education that is 'freeing,' that is, that leads to the development of critical consciousness. Faculty members of the experimental program and government officials were interviewed, reports of the project read, and the literature reviewed to gain insight into the factors leading to the conceptualization of the program and its noncontinuation. A hermeneutic-dialectical method of inquiry and analysis was employed, in which the meaning of the events to the participants was sought, and the contradictions in the situation brought to the surface. The data analysis revealed that on one level there were political and economic reasons for the program not being established as a permanent course of study at the Free University, but, at a deeper level, it was an oppressive act toward the nursing discipline to prevent its entrance into the realm of university education. Jurgen Habermas' critical social theory and Paulo Freire's model of oppressed group behavior and a pedagogy of the oppressed were reviewed to provide the theoretical underpinnings for dealing with a situation of oppression in order to determine ways to transcend it. Based upon these constructs, the characteristics of an education that is 'freeing' were outlined and related specifically to the realm of nursing. This was based upon the belief that it is only through the shedding of false consciousness imposed upon individuals that they will be able to clearly see reality and intervene in its course to bring about a situation that is less constraining, that is, more 'freeing.'