Guest Contributor: Aissatou Gueye
PhD Student, Connell School of Nursing, Boston College

Early in my nurse practitioner (NP) career, I remember sitting with a patient long after the visit was supposed to end. The chart was complete. The orders were in. By every measurable standard, the work was done. And yet something essential was still unfolding in the room. What guided me in that moment was not a protocol or an algorithm, but an awareness of the person in front of me—her story, her fear, and the meaning the diagnosis of breast cancer carried in her life.

At the time, I would not have named what I was doing as nursing knowledge or theory. It simply felt human. Now, I recognize it as the essence of nursing’s personal and esthetic patterns of knowing: seeing the person, not just the condition, as described by Barbara A. Carper (1978). These ways of knowing help illuminate how we, as nurses, participate in change within everyday practice.

Barrett (2010) describes power not as control or authority, but as freedom to knowing participation in change. In the moment I chose to remain present beyond the time allocated for the visit, power began with intention, unfolded through choice, and was lived through participation in the meaning my patient was making of her diagnosis. Nursing practice is full of these moments. We form intentions about how we want to be present. We make choices about what to attend to, what to ask, and what to prioritize. We participate in change alongside patients and families, even when that change is subtle or slow.

Yet often, much of this knowing remains unspoken!

Although care is widely regarded as the essence of nursing (Hadadian-Chaghaei et al., 2022), and rightly so, it does not always announce itself as knowledge. How often have we witnessed Carper’s patterns of knowing living quietly in practice settings? Empirical knowing is present when we interpret clinical data, recognize patterns in symptoms, and anticipate complications before they fully emerge. Personal knowing takes shape in the use of self, in how we listen, attune, and respond to what matters most to the person in front of us. Esthetic knowing is expressed in the timing of our presence, the words we choose or withhold, and the way care is shaped moment by moment through perception and action. Ethical knowing guides the moral dimensions of practice, informing decisions about advocacy, respect, and what ought to be done when protocols alone are insufficient. Together, these ways of knowing are carried through presence, relationship, and clinical judgment. They shape outcomes, yet they do not always leave a visible trace that others can easily see or name. Without a written language through scholarship and research publication, this knowledge risks being dismissed as intuition or mere common sense.

This is where research enters!

What nursing does not explicitly name, it risks losing. Research gives structure to what is lived, language to what is felt, and visibility to what might otherwise remain unseen, ensuring that care is not only practiced but recognized as nursing knowledge (Flanagan, 2019). In this way, research is how nursing makes its ways of knowing visible. It is how intention becomes inquiry, choices become patterns that can be examined, and participation in change becomes knowledge that can be shared. Research elevates the scientific foundations of nursing by transforming the art of clinical experience into documented scholarship that validates professional nursing expertise (Arshabayeva et al., 2024).

Publication is an act of participation that allows nurses to share their knowledge with the broader healthcare community!

When nurses publish, they choose to speak. They bring their knowledge into classrooms, policy offices, and interdisciplinary conversations where the future of healthcare is shaped. Publication is not about prestige or productivity. It is an intentional act of participation in change through which nurses make their knowledge visible and enduring. It is a choice to ensure that nursing’s patterns of knowing are not lost, absorbed, or rewritten in languages that do not fully reflect what we actually see and do.

Barrett (2010) reminds us that power is not something we wait to be given. It is something we carry through conscious participation in change. Research and publication are part of that participation. They are how we extend our influence.

For NPs, this matters deeply. Their practice lives at the intersection of nursing philosophy and healthcare environments that often privilege biomedical knowledge over relational and contextual understanding. When nursing theory remains implicit in practice, it can be misunderstood as soft or secondary (Flanagan, 2019). Research and publication give language to what the discipline knows. They make visible the intentions, choices, and participation that shape advanced nursing care and affirm it as nursing knowledge

For nursing as a discipline, and for Nursology in particular, this is not an individual task. Advancing nursing knowledge requires greater intradisciplinary cohesion, stronger collaboration between nurse scientists and clinicians, and mentorship that moves beyond encouragement to active partnership. When we support one another in translating practice into scholarship and scholarship back into practice, research and publication become collective acts of epistemic responsibility. This is how we participate in change together, how our science continues to grow and illuminate our path, and how we remain grounded in our heritage while carrying nursing’s legacy forward.

References

Arshabayeva, G. A., Qumar, A. B., Yessirkepov, M., Zimba, O., & Kocyigit, B. F. (2024). Advancing Research, Writing, and Publishing in Nursing: Addressing Challenges and Improving Standards. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 39(38), e297. https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2024.39.e297

Barrett, E. A. M. (2010). Power as Knowing Participation in Change: What’s New and What’s Next. Nursing Science Quarterly, 23(1), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894318409353797

Carper, B. A. (1978). Fundamental Patterns of Knowing in Nursing: Advances in Nursing Science, 1(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1097/00012272-197810000-00004

Flanagan, J. (2019). Nursing knowledge development: Making the implicit, explicit. International Journal of Nursing Knowledge, 30(2), 67.

Hadadian-Chaghaei, F., Haghani, F., Taleghani, F., Feizi, A., & Alimohammadi, N. (2022). Nurses as Gifted Artists in Caring: An Analysis of Nursing Care Concept. Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, 27(2), 125–133. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijnmr.ijnmr_465_20

About Aissatou “Aysha” Gueye, DNP, MSN, APN-BC

Aysha is an Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, Immigrant/Refugee Health NP, Preceptor, and PhD student at the Boston College Connell School of Nursing. Her clinical and research interests focus on effective healthcare communication for NPs, reawakening nursing theory in NP Practice, and immigrant diabetes health. Aysha served as Director of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee at the Massachusetts Coalition of Nurse Practitioners (MCNP) and is an RCC facilitator through the Academy of Communication in Healthcare. She believes nursing theory is not an academic exercise—but the living language of care.