On impostorship, cultural suicide, and other dangers: how nurses learn critical thinking

Critical thinking is an important idea whose time seems to have come for nursing education. However, as a newly fashionable buzzword, it is in danger of being uncritically accepted, of being regarded as the panacea for all problems of nursing practice. This article goes behind the positive rhetoric of critical thinking to explore how this process manifests itself in the lives of nursing practitioners, nurse managers, administrators, and educators. Drawing on nurses' own stories of what happened as they challenged conventional professional or organizational assumptions and as they explored alternative perspectives on nursing practice, a picture of critical thinking "from the inside" emerges. Themes of impostorship, cultural suicide, lost innocence, roadrunning, and community emerge as defining features of the critical thinking process. It becomes clear that critical thinking is a strongly emotional as well as cognitive process, and that it carries considerable political dangers for its protagonists.