DNP Role Development for Doctoral Advanced Nursing Practice, Second Edition

32 ■ I: HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR ROLE DELINEATION

have and now require a clinical practice dissertation that was previously only a project
(Dr. Regina Cusson, personal communication, June 25, 2010). In some ways, it seems
un- egalitarian to say that one doctoral nursing graduate will create the evidence and the
other will then translate and disseminate it. Good science, especially science grounded
in practice, is not really conducted that way. That is part of the critique that Florczak
(2010) had made querying “just how and where one could [could one] arbitrarily uncou-
ple the practice of nursing from nursing research” (p. 16)?
The University of Washington School of Nursing faculty’s initially promoted
the concept of “practice inquiry” (which some schools adopted; Magyary, Whitney, &
Brown, 2006). Although this scholarly approach did not prohibit the conduct of nurs-
ing research, it was designed to frame their DNP scholarly end product with a practice
orientation and called it a clinical investigative project.^16 The call to revisit the particu-
lar “scholarly/ research mission” of the DNP was heard over the last decade (Bellini &
Cusson, 2010; Reel, 2009; Smith Glasgow & Dreher, 2010; Terry, 2014; Vincent, Johnson,
Velasquez, & Rigney, 2014; Webber, 2008) and again with the new white paper on the
DNP (AACN, 2015), what lies ahead is hopefully a maturing of scholarship from DNP
graduates and a more precise mentoring and supervision from their DNP faculty. This
author has studied DNP curricula intensely for years. Having chaired two national con-
ferences on the practice doctorate and presented at the first International Conference on
Professional Doctorates in London in 2009, this author has come to hypothesize that the
DNP graduate may be best positioned to create “Practice Knowledge” for the profession
(Dreher, 2010b, 2016b). In my view, it is in the focus on creating practice- based evidence
where DNP graduates may excel, even beyond the PhD graduate. Moreover, although
this author does support BSN- to- PhD options for some exceptionally talented students,
at matriculation into their post- baccalaureate PhD program, they will have less a frame
of reference to know what questions should be asked.
In my own proposed model of scientific inquiry in nursing (see Figure 1.3), I sug-
gest that it is practice knowledge or mode 2 knowledge (represented by the right cir-
cle of the Venn diagram) that the DNP graduate is most prepared to conduct (Dreher,

Mode 1

Knowledge

Theoretical

Knowledge

Mode 2

Knowledge

Practice

Knowledge

Best practice-based

evidence knowledge

Universal knowledge

in

nursing, health, and related disciplines

Best evidence-based

practice knowledge

FIGURE 1.3 A model of scientifi c inquiry in nursing.

Source : Dahnke and Dreher (2016).