DIANNE YOW DANIELS
NURSING
Your first Pfeiffer nursing class graduates in 2013. What was it like building a new program? Starting a brand new program is an opportunity that rarely happens. When I called the NC Board of Nursing for advice, they told me that it had been quite a while since a university in NC had started a traditional BSN program from scratch. It was exciting to build a nursing curriculum that would reflect Pfeiffer’s mission and values. What made it possible? That first year I was here writing and designing the curriculum, Dean McCallum was an incredible advocate for nursing and he’s still very involved. I was also surprised that nursing directors at other colleges bent over backwards to help. I guess that says a lot about the people in the nursing profession. How is your teaching philosophy different from those other schools? My teaching philosophy is based on making every moment in nursing education a “caring moment” – socializing the student into a caring role. It’s a model that affects the whole climate of the program – how we interact with students and with each other. We’re also very concerned about student success, so we spend a lot of one-on-one time with students, something that’s easier on a small campus like ours. How do you prepare nursing students for the real world? We’ve hired qualified faculty and have selected specific learning experiences in the clinical settings that will help us produce graduates who are capable of providing safe patient care. We also use human patient simulators in our Nursing Lab as an instructional strategy for students to practice “real” situations without risk to patients and to increase student confidence. What’s the advantage of enrolling in a new nursing program like yours? We are able to incorporate the new and more difficult passing standards for the national licensure examination and accreditation updates from the start rather than retrofitting them into an existing program. We also have a great collaborative relationship with science faculty who include current topics critical to nursing into the science prerequisite coursework.
DIANNE YOW DANIELS, CNE Associate Professor of Nursing and Chair of the Nursing Program A.D.N., Stanly Community College B.S.N., University of North Carolina, Charlotte M.S.N., University of North Carolina, Charlotte Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Charlotte
My teaching philosophy is based on making every moment in nursing education a “caring moment” – socializing the student into a caring role.
— Dianne