Contesting our taken-for-granted understanding of student evaluation: insights from a team of institutional...

Educating for nursing excellence can be demanding and challenging work. One of the troubling centers of attention for nurse educators is their evaluation of nursing students in practice. This article outlines some of the problems nurse educators encounter in evaluation work and uses the theoretical framework of institutional ethnography to disrupt some of the conventional explanations that mediate what happens in teaching and evaluation work when students fail to meet the required standards. In developing our analysis, we describe our research process and provide details about how we used some of the methodological conventions of institutional ethnography. The early findings from this project provide an alternate knowledge of our evaluation practices, which demands that we question our taken-for-granted understanding of due process and what it is accomplishing. Our findings raise compelling ethical questions that guide nurse educators to rethink our evaluation work.