Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
Nurses in Uganda, like nurses in the United States, are struggling with questions of professional identity and what or even whether a bachelor’s degree in nursing adds to the nurse enough to justify its additional expense, time, and academic labor. “I don’t want my nurse to quote Shakespeare,” said a non-nurse friend, “I just want her to give me my shot.” We were discussing whether nursing education should include humanities. I’ve forgotten the friend who said this; the comment has stuck in my memory, an iconic summary of all such questioning about what it means to be a nurse and what entails an appropriate education for such a profession.
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Belmont PT Grad featured in East Tennessee Newspaper Story
Belmont alumna Erin Cook was featured in her hometown newspaper, The Elizabethton Star, for her work in the Sports Residency Program at Physical Therapy Services in Elizabethton, Tenn. Cook, who received her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from Belmont in 2009, is preparing to take the Certified Sports Physical Therapy Specialty exam. Cook is currently working with with Dr. Danny Smith, a Belmont adjunct professor, and his son Dr. Justin Smith, a 2006 graduate of Belmont’s School of Physical Therapy.
“I Would Teach for Free”
Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
“I would teach for free but they have to pay me to grade papers.” This comment from a teacher friend was naturalized long ago into my habitual outlook on things and without any difficulty whatsoever. I have been and continue to be grading, or “marking” as they call it here, papers, what seems like hundreds of them, weeks on end now. I know that “hundreds” is a hallucination of a paper-fevered brain but there have been and are being lots. Grading graduate nursing papers, all of which have been written by students for whom English is not their first language, has turned out to be not that different from grading nursing papers by students in the U.S. for whom English is their mother tongue. Having to grade the papers turns out to be our students’ revenge for us assigning so many of them.