“The Hudsonian Godwit makes a trip from breeding grounds in arctic Alaska almost to the southernmost tip of South America—just under 10,000 miles!” – Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

When I was a child we called one another “birdbrain” when we had done something stupid or counterproductive.  It was a harsh insult.  But in more recent years a significant amount of research has been done on bird brains.  Lo and behold, the corvid family of birds (crows, magpies) is amazingly intelligent!  They can problem solve, are self-aware, can recall where they hid food nine months earlier, use street traffic to crack nuts, are social and maintain a strong sense of community, and they recognize the faces of those humans who have been mean to them.1 Well, the child-me was wrong about birdbrains.

In a recent email the Cornell Lab of Ornithology sent out, it said that “the Hudsonian Godwit makes a trip from breeding grounds in arctic Alaska almost to the southernmost tip of South America—just under 10,000 miles!”  As I went down the Burrowing Owl hole of knowledge, I discovered that the Godwit managed the remarkable and extremely demanding 10,000 mile journey by using unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS), a deep sleep, when migrating, that is, half their brain sleeps while migrating, while the other half remains awake to predators, dangers, and for navigation. At the same time, the eye contralateral to the awake hemisphere remains open and pointed in the direction of migration, dangers, or predators. The Godwit is not the only bird that uses USWS when migrating or otherwise in need of sleep, hummingbirds do as well, and USWS is also used by some marine mammals, some reptiles like turtles,2 and some students in class. Birds can even use USWS in a flock where the birds at the edge of the flock use USWS to protect the whole flock, called group edge effect. Though uncertain about precisely how far I can stretch this metaphor, let me don my bird brain and try.

From the start of modern nursing, nurses have been among the brightest, most creative, and socially engaged women/persons to craft a new profession.  Nurses demonstrated an astonishing intellect and vision when modernizing the  profession, its education and practice, and later its research. In the process, over the decades, they created a distinctive nursing science, ethics, practice, and identity.

As nursing moved into colleges and universities, it became necessary for the profession to offer graduate degrees.  The master’s degree had long been available to those who wanted to become teachers of nursing, even before there were programs in colleges.3 But the larger movement of nursing from hospital-based diploma programs into colleges and universities required that nursing faculty have earned doctorates, ultimately to earn promotion and tenure, that is, to be able to remain on a university faculty.  Doctoral programs in nursing were not widely available so the first generation of university nursing faculty sought degrees in other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, physiology, and so on.  What they brought back from those disciplines was enriching, strengthening, and broadening, but a two edged sword. It could enrich, but it could also sidetrack the continued development of a distinctive nursing knowledge.  A useful and critical importation was called for.  On the other hand, on its own, nursing could become so insular and perspectivaly narrow in its vision that it fails to heed the critique that other disciplines could bring. Nursing itself risks focusing its vision of the profession in ways that actually even exclude a broader nursing knowledge. Both external and internal forces  provide nursing with opportunities and temptations to drift away from nursing knowledge.  The example that I know best and personally is that of nursing ethics.

Nursing had a fulsome, philosophically informed, coherent and capacious nursing ethics that had developed for over 100 years, complete with nursing ethics textbooks (1900 forward) and NLN curricular standards (1915 forward). It was a normative ethics that guided practice in all spheres of nursing.  That ethics was lost in the transition into colleges and universities and, instead, nursing was colonized by the philosophers and physicians who dominated bioethics.4 Nursing had fallen into REM sleep with both hemispheres asleep, both eyes closed.

In every nook and cranny of nursing there is a temptation to drift: to drift away from nursing knowledge, the temptation to drift away from the humanities with their reflection upon human experience, a temptation to drift away from experiential expertise and into a reified science; a temptation to drift away from reflective, carefully developed nursing theory into outcomes-based, competencies-based,  task orientation; the temptation to drift from nursing as a theory-informed practice to nursing technicians, the temptation to drift from “knowing how and when (reasoning across time, and situated thinking-in-action), in contrast to objectified, detached lists of knowing that and about,”5 and even the temptation to drift away from nursing knowledge and identity itself.

But.  But there are those at the edge of the flock who have one eye open, one hemisphere alert while the other hemisphere rests in sleep; one eye that can navigate and see dangers and predators. The birds at the center of the flock sleep fully, with both hemispheres, both eyes closed, without the alertness of the group edge birds who watch out for them. These are the birds that we need to listen to, whom we should heed when they warn us. They are on the edges of the flock, though at the margins, not to be marginalized;  they warn and protect.  Who might they be?  This is the task of those of us who are concerned about nursing knowledge, nursing theory, nursing’s ways of knowing, nursing ethics — to identify those in the group edge effect position and to listen to them.  In nursing ethics, Pamela Grace, Connie Ulrich, Patricia Benner, Aimee Milliken, Kara Curry, and others come to mind as in that position.  Heed their warnings!  Don’t drift from nursing ethics.  Don’t drift from nursing knowledge.  Navigate as the group edge birds warn, and avoid nursing’s potential dangers, predators, and navigational drift.

I wonder — in your own domain of nursing, who is in your group edge effect position;  what do they have to say to you, and for us?

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Footnotes

[1] See the BBC and PBS specials: The Life of Birds

[2] Just Google or Wikipedia it folks.

[3] Teacher’s College Columbia, Nursing, established 1899 and formalized and expanded 1907. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/health-studies-applied-educational-psychology/nursing-education/online-learning/#:~:text=Why%20has%20the%20curriculum%20changed,leaders%2C%20researchers%2C%20and%20scholars.

[4] Fowler, Marsha. Nursing Ethics, 1880s to the Present: An Archeology of Lost Wisdom and Identity. London: Routledge, April 2024.

[5] Benner, Patricia. “Studying Expert Ethical Comportment and Preserving the Ethics of Care and Responsibility Embedded in Expert Nursing Practice,” Chapter 9 in Fowler, Marsha. Nursing Ethics, 1880s to the Present: An Archeology of Lost Wisdom and Identity. London: Routledge, April 2024.