Authors

  1. Onubogu, Uloma D. PhD, AGPCNP-BC, FNP-BC

Article Content

Positive faculty self-care and well-being are essential to engage, innovate, empower, and educate nursing students for the current and future health care workforce. Often, minority nursing faculty encounter and manage challenges of varying nature related to their academic roles. However, the unusual circumstance of the recent pandemic revealed unique challenges and the increased calculated health risks that minority faculty might face in their primary teaching functions. For example, providing face-to-face classroom instruction or clinical teaching despite the pandemic induced perceptions of a significant threat to self-preservation among minority faculty. An established action plan is important to mitigate the personal vulnerabilities of faculty and potential or actual impacts of recognizable physical, emotional, and environmental threats on teaching effectiveness. Strategies recommended to promote positive faculty self-care and improve instructional effectiveness are as follows: (1) as a primary step, faculty should embrace self-awareness and self-compassion as a foundation for building positive self-care and confidence to support their duties; (2) they should incorporate the active engagement of students as allies in self-care by co-creating support, awareness, and acquiring skills and behaviors that promote well-being in the classroom or clinical learning environments; and (3) academic leadership should improve inclusive awareness of threats to faculty well-being and mitigate known and potential risks to effective teaching. Leaders can achieve greater success by learning how minority faculty are thriving in the teaching-learning environment and being clear about specific indicators of positive self-care to be monitored.