The potential negative impact of current orthodoxy on nursing education

What impact does nursing's current reigning orthodoxy have on the everyday lives of nurse educators? In the process of conceptualising a research project on the impact of current literature on nurse educators' beliefs and practices in relation to teaching methodology, the authors discovered that orthodoxy can have a negative impact on teaching method selection. In fact, they discovered that orthodoxy can pose many dangers in other areas as well because it always has the potential for achieving the status of dogma (i.e. beliefs which are accepted as absolute truth). In this paper, the authors attempt to outline the processes they went through in conceptualising their research project in the hopes that the identification of these processes might aid others in avoiding the many possible traps posed by orthodoxy. In addition, the authors hope the article stimulates further research on the impact of orthodoxy in nursing, particularly in nursing education.