4 minute read
NURSING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MOTIVATES ADULT LEARNERS
MARQUITA LYONS-SMITH, DNP, is a clinical assistant professor in the NCCU Department of Nursing and the director of Project Kitty Hawk.
What inspired you to become a nurse?
Well, there are a number of unintentional happenings that inspired me to become a nurse. First, my mother was a nurse. I have fond memories of her coming home wearing her cute white uniform. She worked for the Department of Veteran Affairs Health Care System, and I loved listening to her talk about her experiences there. A little later, when I was around 14 years old, my mother gave birth to my little brother, and because we were so far apart in age, I became somewhat of a second mother to him. I enjoyed caring for him.
The third thing that I believe helped me along this path occurred when I was in high school. I completed most of my core classes during my sophomore and junior years in high school. So, in my senior year, during the second half of the day, I would leave school early and work part-time at a daycare center. I really started to develop a love for working with kids. However, I did not see myself working in the daycare setting as my end career path.
So, that’s where the healthcare background in my family and my love and passion for kids meshed. It was at this time that I decided to go to school, become a nurse and strictly work in pediatric nursing because that is where my passion lies.
In fact, I still practice one day a week as a pediatric nurse practitioner in a primary care setting and I still love it.
What do you think makes North Carolina
Central University (NCCU) a unique experience for students seeking a career in nursing?
We provide students with a demographically diverse setting in which to learn, coupled with the academic rigor that is necessary to compete in today’s highly competitive healthcare industry. I believe students that graduate from our nursing program gain the necessary skills to adapt to different environments and be quality professionals no matter where they practice.
You are the director of Project Kitty Hawk, NCCU’s Online RN to BSN option. What is Project Kitty Hawk?
Project Kitty Hawk is a state-funded, non-profit initiative. The primary goal of Project Kitty Hawk is to help universities within the University of North Carolina System design workforce aligned online programs, as well as attract, enroll, and support adult learners through graduation.
We collaborate with Project Kitty Hawk to enhance and redesign some of our courses that we offer to our RN-BSN students. With its assistance, we can more readily cater to the needs of adult learners, providing the resources they need to support their learning styles.
Project Kitty Hawk assists us with marketing, which in turn, helps to increase our enrollment. So, with this increase in enrollment, we need to be able to sustain that growth and the quality of the courses we offer.
When we consider the adult learner, we try our best to implement the adult learner principles of Malcolm Knowles, Ph.D. Knowles, was a renowned adult learner education expert, whose theory puts forth the idea that adults are not going to be motivated by the same things that children are motivated by.
In short, according to Knowles, adults tend to be motivated by their livelihood, their ability to improve outcomes, to be able to problem-solve and to take life experiences and implement those experiences into their learning. Most adult learners, according to Knowles, don’t want to waste their time. They’re not interested in coming into an academic environment and learning something that’s not going to be useful to them right now.
When a student graduates from the NCCU nursing program, what do you want them to remember most about their experience here?
I really want them to remember how much we cared about them. I want them to remember their professors. I want them to be able to say that their professors really inspired them. I want them to say their professors were the reason they decided to go further in their nursing careers or why they decided to implement a certain practice into their work setting.
