Saga – Verle Waters – Part 1

This episode of the NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga track is part one of two celebrating the life of Verle Waters. The podcast highlights Verle's significant contributions to nursing education, particularly her role in the associate degree nursing education revolution. Verle was instrumental in developing family-centered nursing courses and welcoming diverse students into the profession, changing the face of the nursing workforce. Despite facing backlash from diploma and baccalaureate programs, she persisted and helped establish over 600 ADN programs across the U.S. Verle's advocacy for ADN graduates and her efforts in nursing education reform shaped her career as a leading voice in the movement.

Dedicated to excellence in nursing, the National League for Nursing is the leading organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education. Find past episodes of the NLN Nursing EDge podcast online. Get instant updates by following the NLN on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube. For more information, visit NLN.org.

Transcript

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Welcome to Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga as we use stories to connect the past to  the present and then our future as we reimagine our teaching and learning.  As we celebrate the NLN Year of the Nurse Educator we pay tribute to extraordinary nurses who've made  significant contributions to nursing education. We dive into the stories of nurse educators  who recognized a need, challenged traditional customs, and influenced transformative change.  Throughout 2022 we have focused on the contributions of educators and reformers  who significantly impacted the scholarship of nursing education as part of the National League  for Nursing's Curriculum Revolution. They opened the door to new ways to think about curriculum,  clinical judgment, the power dynamics inherent in the student-teacher relationship, and theoretical  underpinnings of clinical practice. This month we celebrate another revolutionary, Verle Waters,  a national leader in associate degree nursing education and a scholar whose deepest professional  commitment was to move the profession as a whole forward. Verle valued personal connections and always  asked colleagues to call her by her first name. We will honor that preference in this episode of Saga.  Raised on a farm in Depression-era Minnesota, Verle earned a Bachelor of Science from the  University of Minnesota in 1948 and a Masters in Arts from Columbia Teachers College in New  York five years later, a remarkable pathway in the early 1950s. For over a half a century from 1952  to her death in 2016, Verle led and contributed to reform movements that reconceptualized entry  into practice, academic progression in nursing, and clinical instruction in pre-licensure programs. In  2007 she wrote about her 50-plus year remarkable journey concluding, "Broadly speaking, there  were revolutionary changes in nursing education and I had my turns at the barricades."  In 1952 while working as a public health nurse in New York City, Verle joined her first revolution.  She was asked by Dr. Mildred Montag to become a full-time teacher in one of the seven initial  associate degree programs in the United States at Orange County Community College in upstate New  

York. In her words: 4:16

The teachers in the emerging junior college nursing program envisioned a program of learning that would revolutionize nursing education.

To use Verle's words: 4:26

the curriculum no longer would be based, "on a map of a hospital."  For example, Dr. Montag asked Verle to design and implement the first family-centered nursing course  based on her population-based approach to nursing care delivery as a public health nurse. Together  with her pathfinder colleagues, Verle welcomed students who looked differently from traditional  nursing students at that time - women and men who were married with children, who held part-time jobs,  who embraced nursing as a second career and in the process they changed the face of the nursing  workforce. The faculty in the new two-year programs confronted a backlash from leaders of diploma  programs and emerging baccalaureate programs Yet they persisted and within 20 years over 600  ADN programs existed across the U.S., educating almost 50 percent of the new nurse workforce.  Verle's engagement in the radical associate degree program evolution shaped her career  identity as a reformer and for the next half century she served as a leading voice of the  movement. Verle chose to mount the barricades again in the 1970s when the American Nurses Association  led a vigorous campaign to end the licensing of the ADN graduate as a registered nurse.  She told assembled audiences at numerous national conferences and meetings that the  distinction between ADN and BSN education loses precision and, "vaporizes as it drifts from  the teaching hospital in urban centers out through the suburbs until, on reaching the 75-bed hospital  in a small town, it is a diffuse and foreign notion." For Verle, the realization  that the entry into practice wars, as she described the era, focused on identifying difference, rather  than collaborating with practice to align with models of care delivery, led to over 20 years of  estrangement and self-protected responses. Yet she persisted and eventually RN-BSN pathways  became the norm in nursing education. Always gracious and known as a gifted and thoughtful  listener, Verle kept her toes, as she often said, in both the often-volatile worlds of associate  degree nursing advancement and the broader issues of practice and curriculum reform.  In part two of this episode, we will explore her role in the NLN Curriculum Revolution as she continued her journey to climb the barricades of reform. And so the Saga continues and may our Saga continue as we bring to a close this episode  of Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga. Thank you for joining us