Discourses with potential to disrupt traditional nursing education: Nursing teachers' talk about norm-critical competence

This paper describes the discourses underlying nursing teachers' talk about their own norm-critical competence. Norm criticism is an approach that promotes awareness and criticism of the norms and power structures that exert an excluding effect in society in general and in the healthcare encounter in particular. Given the unequal relationships that can exist in healthcare, for example relationships shaped by racism, sexism and classism, a norm-critical approach to nursing education would help illuminate these matters. The studied empirical material consisted of focus group interviews. Nursing teachers discussed their norm-critical competence based on the university course Norm-Aware Caring in which they had recently participated. Through a critical discourse analysis, three discourses were identified in their talk, all of which had the potential to disrupt traditional, normative nursing education. However, in all three discourses there was an underlying discourse of normality, clearly positioning the teachers as exemplifying the normal. The binary constructed between normality and otherness contradicts a basic tenet of the norm-critical approach and may hamper the development of genuine norm-critical competence in nursing education.