Epistemological leadership in nursing education

To propose epistemological leadership as a framework for understanding how curriculum decisions shape knowledge architecture and professional formation in nursing education.

Curriculum design in nursing education is often treated as a technical task of selecting content, organising courses and meeting accreditation requirements. This framing can obscure the epistemological work of curriculum design in determining what knowledge is treated as central, durable and professionally legitimate.

Discussion paper.

A conceptual analysis was undertaken, drawing on curriculum, leadership and nursing education scholarship. The argument is illustrated through the redesign of an undergraduate nursing program in an Australian university context.

Epistemological leadership is enacted through three interdependent modes: cognitive enactment, which makes knowledge commitments explicit and translates them into curriculum architecture; relational enactment, which builds shared understanding and coordination across distributed teams; and political enactment, which secures legitimacy and durability within regulatory and institutional systems. The illustrative case shows how mental health, trauma-informed care, clinical reasoning and integrated bioscience can be positioned as longitudinal architectural commitments rather than isolated content areas.

Epistemological leadership helps explain how curricula move beyond fragmented content coverage toward coherent professional formation while remaining accountable to standards, competency expectations and patient safety. Although illustrated through an Australian program redesign, the framework is intended to support analysis of curriculum architecture across diverse international nursing education contexts.