Building Communities of Scholars through a Hologogy for Online Graduate Nursing Education: Reconnecting with the Wisdom of Nursing

Nursing must respond to complex health care needs, but the response will be ineffective without cohesiveness within the nursing community. Advance practice nursing students' exploration of the historical, philosophical, and theoretical structures of nursing can provide an anchor for study of the discipline, promote a feeling of connection with the community of nursing, and foster an understanding of the wisdom that exists within the body of nursing knowledge. The authors have developed and refined a structure and approach for teaching an online nursing theory course to promote students' identification with nursing knowledge and facilitate building a sense of community among the class members and with the discipline, as a whole. The purposes of this article are to describe this model for community building within a master's-level online graduate nursing theory course and to demonstrate student responses to the course process.