Looking Back and Looking Forward

Emeritus Professor Dr Norma Chick PE RGON RM PhD, FCNA, has been a member of the Editorial Group of Nursing Praxis in New Zealand from the inception of "Nursing Praxis" in 1985 to the present day (2016). One can only marvel at this length of service of a great, disciplined and logical mind, and her determination to advance the profession of nursing as a discipline in its own right. Reflecting on the early issues of Nursing Praxis in New Zealand my mind goes back to my early associations with Norma.Alongside Dr Nan Kinross, Norma began the first postregistration, advanced education for registered nurses in New Zealand at Massey University, Palmerston North. In their co-authored book Chalk & Cheese (2006) both wrote of the struggles they experienced to establish nursing in the university environment. Starting in 1973 as a small unit within the Department of Psychology with three students nursing grew quickly, helped by the strong interest shown by New Zealand nurses in furthering their education, and Massey University's mandate to provide extramural studies throughout the country.The entry requirement for university nursing studies in the 1970s was a nursing registration. Local students could study "internally", attending weekly classes, but the majority of students, myself included, had to take the extramural option. Our studies were undertaken by mail, with study guides and set readings arriving at regular intervals. The study guide content was comprehensive and it spelt out step by step what was required of the student. They were the forerunners to other types of study at a distance, forecasting contemporary forms such as e-learning. Each "paper" included compulsory on-campus courses of intensive lectures, tutorials, group projects and tests. On-campus courses were gruelling but also exciting. Through the paper on Nursing Knowledge Norma introduced me and hundreds of other nurses to nursing theory and research. She can be credited with influencing the mind-set of a whole generation of nurses from thinking of nursing as only a practical occupation supported by procedural knowledge to one that is scientifically based on sound evidence to provide a clear rationale for nursing judgements and actions.From the outset, Norma introduced students to the importance of building a distinctive body of knowledge that would establish nursing as a discipline in its own right. Discipline was defined as "a unique perspective, a distinct way of viewing all phenomena which ultimately defines the limits and nature of its inquiry" (Donaldson & Crowley, 1978, p.113). Norma taught that received knowledge while it supported a vocational perception of nursing, was inadequate to provide the foundation for a scientific discipline. Thus began our journey of discovery-introduction to philosophy, logic, and exposure to conceptual frameworks and to theories of nursing, mainly those developed by American nurse scholars such as Henderson, Orem, Roy, Rogers, and others, and most importantly our own search for a definition of nursing.Norma was also a superb research supervisor as early students moved on to graduate studies and began conducting clinical research in nursing. Her capacity to challenge students to think critically, to write incisively, and to defend their views by references to research evidence and careful reasoning was legendary. It is these qualities that she also brought to her editorial board work for Nursing Praxis.Under Norma's instruction, nurses developed an ability to think critically about their practice and to consider the importance of theory development and research. These two activities were essential if nursing was to rise as a discipline in its own right. The latter did not just happen; nurses had to be taught to think differently.I recall the struggle in Norma's paper Nursing Knowledge reading and trying to understand conceptual and theoretical frameworks as a way to view person, health, nurse, and environment; the four key conceptual areas viewed as the means to "organise facts, principles and theories" (Doheny, Cook, & Stopper, 1997, p. …