Online Tea Cafés: Using Caring Science to Transform Digital Learning Spaces and Advance Nursing Leadership

Abstract

Given the current trend towards online nursing education and the recent changes to teaching and learning modalities as a result of a global pandemic, developing a distance-learning pedagogy for students that seeks to explore the power of compassion in the digital world is both timely and necessary. Drawing on pedagogical strategies used in an online nursing course including asynchronous online discussions called Tea Cafés, the authors showcase how they advanced knowledge and understanding in relation to nursing leadership and professional formation. By underpinning the authors’ distance-learning pedagogy in caring science, students not only thrived, but created a strong sense of community, developed leadership skills, and evolved their understanding of how to leverage nursing knowledge via compassion, reflexivity, and politicization to advocate for historically underrepresented communities. By way of student feedback and performance in relation to course learning outcomes, the authors concluded that a pedagogical strategy grounded in caring science can create a reflexive, compassionate, and politicized digital space for transformative learning for both student and educator alike.