Mission Statement

Seneca College’s IEN Program Mission Statement

The mission of the School of Nursing’s Internationally Educated Nurses Programs is to facilitate the International nurse’s development of current Canadian nursing knowledge, research, current practice, leadership and management theories and practices as it relates to the unique roles of Canadian Nurses practicing in Ontario in the leadership, chronic disease management and coronary care fields.

We honour and respect the unique lived experience of all people and their inner wisdom in terms of the processes of health, healing and quality of life. This extends to our students as international nurses with diverse and unique experiences to add to our collective knowledge.

What does Nursing mean to our faculty team?

Nursing’s mission is the betterment of human and planetary life, both locally and globally, now and for the future. This mission is based on nursing as a unique body of theoretical, philosophical and personal knowledge that is expressed through ways of being with humans as they journey through processes of living health and healing. The practice of nursing, based on this philosophy and informed by nursing science, is lived in caring relationships with persons, families and communities. These relationships support and enhance health, healing and quality of life. Nursing scholarship focuses on inquiry into the human experiences of health and healing, as well as the creative, integrative and expressive forms of caring healing enacted in nursing practice. Nursing knowledge and practice inform and shape each other. The synergistic effect enables nurses to understand and significantly contribute to persons’ experiences of health and healing.

Sources of knowing in nursing are unbounded; that is, as unitary beings in relation, nurses draw on multiple sources of knowing including the rational, empirical, theoretical, philosophical, personal, moral and ethical, intuitive and transcendent. Caring nurses utilize these multiple sources of knowing to be with, witness and co-create quality of life with clients, their families and the community they serve.

Nursing in Ontario and in Canada as a whole, is a self-regulated profession. Nurses are responsible and accountable for providing competent and ethical practice to their clients, the public, their colleagues and themselves. Nurses have a professional responsibility to seek continuously to improve their practice through critical self-reflection, scholarship, research and innovation.

Nurses have a professional and ethical responsibility to influence, advocate for and support healthy public policy, institutional practices that promote quality of working life, and legislation that contributes to the health of nurses and humankind.

Teaching and Learning

Nurses value the limitless possibilities of learning. Learning is a lifelong, often mysterious, dynamic process of personal and professional growth. It builds on experience, stimulates critical reflection and fosters the (re)formulation of the meaning of experience through the creativity of imagining. It contributes to self-esteem, self- knowledge and choosing our possibilities. Teachers and learners as co-learners become partners in a collaborative learning process. A community of learners brings valuable knowledge and experience that is respected in the learning environment.

Adults are capable of and have the right and responsibility to be self-directing learners. Teaching-learning is a dynamic process of discovery through interaction and engagement, which occurs in both formal and informal contexts that acknowledge multiple ways of knowing. Authentic caring through transpersonal relationships is vital to teaching/learning. Courageous teachers/learners embody the caring curriculum by supporting, encouraging and valuing learners by believing in them and being truly present with them, thereby promoting trust, honesty, creativity, innovation and meaning- making. With this in mind, approaches to teaching/learning include dialogue, modeling, practice, reflective thinking and experiential group process. Formal learning is based on the principles of cooperative, anticipatory-innovative learning. These principles are designed to create a learning community that supports the strengths and learning needs of all learners.

Teaching and learning processes enhance learners’ ability to think critically and reflectively while finding pathways to new knowledge, freedom and connectedness with one another. This may occur from both intended and unintended learning. A shared learning journey enables each person to find his or her own voice, nourish his or her soul, and be committed to lifelong learning.