562 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
superficial understanding of the faculty role and responsibilities. There are unfortu-
nately no easy answers for these dilemmas, but they are serious and require thought-
ful consideration.
With the introduction of a critical mass of nursing educators with the DNP degree,
the profession has an opportunity to reexamine the various roles of nurse faculty and
create a model that encourages a model that plays to individual faculty’s strengths. The
authors suggest three professorial roles: nurse scientist, educator clinician, and clini-
cian educator. Nursing education must redefine the expectations of the nursing faculty
with a primary focus on research, teaching, or clinical. The doctoral advanced nurs-
ing practice educator is in a unique position to serve in the clinician educator role , as
they are able to integrate the knowledge they present in the classroom with a clinical
practice context. The question remains, however: Will DNP students obtain the edu-
cational theory and didactic content needed in order to be successful in the classroom
(in person and online)? With more than 30% of DNP graduates now going into acade-
mia, will DNP programs create options that do not entail extra courses for DAPNs who
want to teach other advanced practice students and require courses in pedagogy as
part of the curriculum (Zungolo, 2009)? Program evaluation, quality improvement, and
epidemiology curricula also need to be added to strengthen DNP program curricula.
These foundational steps are critical and must be expanded to reduce the gap between
research and practice and bring about reliable and sustainable practice improvement.
This preparation will strengthen the nursing profession’s response to this national focus
on improving health care through innovation and quality measurement; however, more
engagement in these opportunities is needed (Johnson, Smith Glasgow, & Guimond,
2016). As we move forward, all DNP programs need to be sufficiently academically
rigorous with the appropriate course content to adequately study and address quality
improvement, access issues, and health promotion needs.
As Potempa and Tilden (2004) have identified, the role of the “PhD prepared nurse
scientist” is critical to generating knowledge in our discipline. Nursing deans need to
find ways to better support research- intensive nursing faculty at the DNP and PhD
levels, perhaps with more realistic teaching loads and service obligations in return for
high scholarly productivity. Rather than have research- active faculty engaged in clinical
teaching, for example, research- active faculty would be better served to have reduced
teaching loads and spend their time teaching nursing research at all levels (under-
graduate, master’s, and doctoral) and mentoring students in the conduct of research.
In doing so, we create an environment that fosters the mission of scholarly productiv-
ity and knowledge development for nursing faculty. Having research- focused faculty
teach both undergraduate and graduate students fosters the desire of young students to
obtain a research doctorate and conduct nursing research. The role of the nurse scientist
requires a change in expectations related to workload, faculty investment, research start-
up funds, and a requisite reward system for scholarly productivity. It is our assumption
that the nursing faculty members who are focused on research will be much more pro-
ductive than faculty members required to participate in traditional tripartite (teaching,
service, and scholarship) roles. With the appropriate education and training on the con-
duct of research, both DNP and PhD nursing graduates have the potential to contribute
to the empirical evidence base of nursing.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released the results
of the first national nursing education study in 30 years (Benner et al., 2009). The study
Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation explores the strengths and weak-
nesses in nursing education, and identifies the most effective practices for teaching
nursing and argues convincingly that nursing education must be reconstructed. Based
on this study, there is a need to address the specific educational demands of teaching