Enacting connectedness in nursing education: moving from pockets of rhetoric to reality

Nursing education research points to lack of faculty support as a factor in nursing students' voluntary or involuntary withdrawal from nursing education programs. Moreover, despite global trends toward educational processes grounded in humanism that foster egalitarian and liberating student-teacher relationships, nursing students continue to report that some nursing faculty struggle to enact the caring philosophy they espouse. This article showcases how a fourth-year nursing student, interviewed for a study of students who experienced failure or its threat in their nursing program, found strength as she navigated her way through nursing faculty abuse. An interpretative analysis of the student's experiences with a group of faculty whom she describes as intent on failing her calls for future research on student-teacher relationships.