Creating a community of scholars: using a community development approach to foster scholarship with nursing faculty

Many nurse educators in Canada have participated in a culture where their primary responsibility was to educate nurses and provide service to their communities. Over the last three decades, major rethinking of this focus has resulted in the expectation that nurse educators engage in scholarship. In this paper, we describe a community development project designed to foster nurse educators' scholarship. This approach was chosen not only to build scholarship capacity amongst nursing faculty, but also to effect a change in the culture of scholarship prevalent in many academic environments. Rather than focusing on individual scholarly endeavours, the project partners' vision is for a collaborative approach that creates a community of scholars working together.