Videoconferencing expands nursing students' cultural realm

Nurse educators struggle to provide culturally diverse community health clinical placements that cultivate cultural awareness, knowledge, and competence among baccalaureate nursing students. Public health nurses observe that many new nursing graduates lack the fundamental knowledge, skills, and affective behaviors necessary to work with culturally diverse populations. To address this, nursing faculty from two schools partnered to strategize, design, implement, and evaluate a community health assessment project using the instructional method of videoconferencing. The goal was to maximize students' exposure to and engagement with geographically and demographically dissimilar populations. Through videoconferencing, students from two distant schools were able to exchange and actively discuss their community health assessments. Videoconferencing gave students the opportunity to exchange community assessments and perceptions augmented by technology and guided through faculty networking. This article describes a piloted teaching strategy by which students performed and exchanged their community health assessments from diverse populations to enhance their cultural awareness.