In teaching Nursing as Caring, faculty assist students to come to know, appreciate, and celebrate self and other as caring person. Mayeroff's On Caring (1971) provides a context for the generic knowing of self as caring. Through dyads or small groups, students share life situations in which they experienced knowing self and other as caring person. Mayeroff's caring ingredients (knowing, alternating rhythm, trust, honesty, hope, courage, humility, patience) also serve as a source for reflection as one asks "who am I as caring person?". As students engage in this exercise, their emerging reflections begin to ground them as they grow in their understanding of person as they live and grow in caring. Students will also draw on the knowledge gleaned in the study of arts and humanities as they attempt to gain a deeper understanding of person. The process of knowing self and other as caring is lifelong. In an educational program grounded in Nursing as Caring, however, the focus on personal knowing (in the study for every nursing situation) provides a deliberate opportunity for greater knowing of self and other as caring person.

Students, as well as faculty, are in a continual search to discover greater meaning of caring as uniquely expressed in nursing; journaling is an approach that facilitates this search. For example, in a special form of journaling, students actively dialogue with authors whose works they are reading and with the ideas expressed in their works. This process enhances the students' understanding of caring in nursing. Over time, students integrate and synthesize many ideas and create new understandings. Examination is another process to facilitate learning. From this theoretical perspective, essay examinations that present nursing situations provide opportunities for students to express their knowledge of nurturing persons living and growing in caring. Aesthetic projects also allow the student the opportunity to communicate understanding of a nursing situation. We would like to share with you a project from a course in which the students were asked to express the beauty of a nursing situation. In this nursing situation, the nurse, Michelle, shared her gifts of therapeutic touch and voice as expressions of caring for David in the moment, drawing on an earlier dialogue in which David told her of his love of meditation and the Ave Maria, she wrote:

AVE MARIA
AND THERAPEUTIC TOUCH
FOR DAVID
"David, let me know your pain;
From fractured leg and heart,
Share with me your private hell.
Next to one who's far,
Far away his own world:
Moaning, crying, weak.
What's it like to lie beside
One who cannot speak?
"Tell me David, what you do
To cancel out the sound;
Eliminate the smell of dung
In which your roommate's found?
Who can you complain about?
Are you worse off than he?
Tied to IV, traction lines
You cannot be free.
"David, I can see your pain.
Tell me where you are.
Tied in bed. Powerless.
From loved ones you're apart.
I can't move you from this place
To take your pain away.
But let me lay my hands on you
And sing to you today."
Ave Marie, gratia plena
Maria, gratia plena.
Ave dominus, dominus tecum.
Benedicta to in mulieribus.
Et benedictus
Et benedictus, fructus ventris;
Ventris tui, Jesu.
Ave Maria
I sang the song he loved and used
To meditate and flee,
Escape tormenting stimuli.
He needed to be freed,
To understand why he must bear
This trial, this hell, this pain,
I sang the tune; I touched with care
To give him peace again.
—Stobie, 1991

Expressions of nursing such as this, which was partly sung, beautifully portray the living of caring between the nurse and the nursed and exemplify how caring enhances personhood. Faculty play a vital role in fostering in students the courage to take such risks. Faculty encourage self-affirmation in students, open, nonjudgmental dialogue, living the caring ideal in the classroom and development of the students' moral groundedness in caring (Boykin & Schoenhofer, 1990). Faculty also take the risk of sharing self through their stories of nursing. The sharing of nursing situations is, in essence, a sharing of our innermost core of common identity and forms a type of collegiality among those who are studying the discipline together.

How can faculty be supported to teach nursing in new ways? The administrator of the program fosters a culture in which the study of the discipline from the caring perspective, as presented here, can be achieved freely and fully. All actions of the dean are directed toward creating, maintaining, and supporting this goal. The theoretical assumptions ground the activities of the dean in both internal and external areas of responsibility.

Internally, the administrator, faculty, staff, and students model commitment by creating an environment that fosters the knowing, living, and growing of persons in caring. The dean "ministers" by assuring that faculty, students, and staff are presented ongoing opportunities to know themselves ontologically as caring persons and professionals and to understand how caring orders their lives. Who we are as person influences who we are as student, colleague, nurse, scholar, and administrator. Therefore, attention must be directed to knowing self. Time must be devoted to knowing and experiencing our humanness.

The constant struggle to know self and other as caring person nourishes our knowing of the nursed. Through constant discovery of self, the other is also continually discovered. This culture sensitizes each person to ways of being with other that necessitate that each action reflect respect for person as person. Therefore, when issues are to be addressed, they are addressed openly and fully. Persons are encouraged to bring forth who they are so there is congruence between actions and feelings. Understanding each other's views is essential to the unfolding of this culture. Dialogue assists one to know the other's needs and desires, and to image oneself in the other's place. As such, the dean, faculty, staff, and students become skilled in the use of the caring ingredients, internalized as personally valid ways of expressing caring: knowing, alternating rhythms, trust, hope, courage, honesty, humility, and patience (Mayeroff, 1971).

Of utmost importance in fostering this culture are decisions regarding selection of faculty. Although many prospective faculty have a fairly traditional lens for the study of nursing (that is, the lens of medical science or frameworks borrowed from other disciplines), this actually becomes an insignificant factor in the process of selection. At the heart of choosing new faculty is knowing their passion for and love of nursing. A focus of the interview process is discerning the person's devotion to the discipline. It is our belief that this attitude, this love of nursing, is the music for the dancers in the circle. One way to know if prospective faculty love nursing is to ask them to share a significant story from practice. Having faculty share a story illuminates their conceptualization of the discipline. Many faculty who have not had the opportunity to teach nursing through an articulated nursing lens, can yet communicate nursing clearly through story.

Faculty are supported in their struggles to conceptualize nursing in a new way. Forums in which faculty come together and aesthetically re-present and share their nursing story is one strategy that effectively engages self and other in the knowing of nursing. It is also a wonderful way to orient faculty as to how to use nursing situations to teach nursing. Faculty support each other as colleagues in learning to teach nursing in a new way, in becoming expert in the practice of nursing education, and in living out the basic assumptions of this theory. This need for support holds true not only for faculty-faculty relationships but for all relationships. The comfort of faculty teaching nursing from the perspective of Nursing as Caring is enhanced as the value of knowing other as caring, as living our histories and as having special nursing stories to share is appreciated.

The administrator, faculty, and staff assist in fostering an environment that furthers the development of the students' capacity to care. Competency in caring is a goal of the educational process. Students are continually guided to know self and other as caring person as faculty and administrators model actions that reflect respect for person as person. Each student is known as caring person, as special and unique. Policies allow for consideration of individual situations and diverse possibilities. In this culture, the dean and faculty attempt to know the student as caring person and student of the discipline. The intention of the dean to know students in this way can be evident through invitations for regularly scheduled dialogue in which students share openly their conceptions about nursing. The administrator is truly with students to know them as caring persons and to hear from them their understanding of nursing as caring.