home » Programs » Continuing Education Courses » Whiteness in Nursing Education an Invitation to Understanding and Transformation
While the population of Canada is culturally and racially diverse, nursing education remains a place of white cultural dominance (Bell, 2020). Many nursing educators are white and unknowingly uphold an educational system that socializes nursing students through a white lens (Hantke, 2022). However, the whiteness of nursing is not simply about a category of skin colour, it is the assumptions and discourses that shape nursing, and the ways power is distributed and held (Jackson, 2023). The nursing profession is also stratified along racial lines with more white people occupying valued clinical and leadership positions in healthcare and educational settings (Bell, 2020). This normalized dominance gives white nurses the privilege of maintaining racial ignorance and reproducing and protecting white supremacy and white privilege (Bell, 2020; Van Herk et al., 2011). Faculty development programs and curricula often fail to address these problematic ways of being, but instead uncritically reproduce dominant norms such as whiteness, heteronormativity, and classism (Blanchet Garneau et al., 2018; Van Herk et al., 2011). Many nurse educators want to interrogate whiteness in nursing education but don’t know how. Bell (2020) suggests centering whiteness as a location for critical intervention, where making whiteness strange can contribute to improved race consciousness and anti-racist skill development.
Mondays, 11:00-1:00 pm EST/EDT
By the end of this course, participants will have developed the following competencies:
Delivery: Online (Zoom & Moodle)
Dr. Bell is an assistant teaching professor with the University of Victoria School of Nursing. Their academic focus is on anti-racist pedagogy which includes learning about whiteness as a system of social and structural power in order motivate and empower nurses to create anti-racist change within themselves and their work environments. Dr. Bell conducted research on strategies of and barriers to anti-racism in Canadian nursing education in 2021 with nurse educators across the country. They have since presented and published on the context of anti-racist learning and practice in nursing education at CASN conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. They were a Queen’s University School of Nursing visiting scholar in March, 2025, presenting on whiteness in nursing education. Their most recent publication deconstructs professionalism as a cherished nursing construct, to demonstrate how whiteness is embedded foundationally in the nursing habitus. This publication is the result of a collaborative reflexive exploration of manifestations of whiteness in the three authors’ practices of education. Dr. Bell has been leading and co-facilitating a small anti-racist community of practice for nurse educators with membership from the UK, Canada, and the USA since 2020.
Dr. Bensler is a tenured associate professor (teaching) and assistant dean academic partnerships at the University of Calgary. In her role, she leads the development of the rural and Indigenous nursing program. Her research focuses on the use of participatory theatre to equip nursing student to recognize and disrupt Indigenous specific racism in healthcare settings. Dr. Bensler’s doctoral research focused on the ways white settler nurse educators understand their identity within the context of Canada’s colonial narrative. She considered the ways whiteness (DiAngelo, 2018a), settler identity (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006), and settler colonial logics act as barriers to transforming white settler understanding of Canada’s settler colonial history and Indigenous sovereignty (Donald, 2009). Dr. Bensler’s research focuses on using participatory theatre as a means to teach self-in-relation and anti-racist skill development.
Member fee: $255 CAD
Non-member fee: $300 CAD