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Background: Undergraduate nursing students have been documented to experience ethical distress during their clinical training and felt poorly supported in discussing the ethical issues they encountered. Research aims: This study was aimed at exploring nursing students' perceived opportunity to discuss ethical issues that emerged during their clinical learning experience and associated factors. Research design: An Italian national cross-sectional study design was performed in 2015–2016. Participants were invited to answer a questionnaire composed of four sections regarding: (1) socio-demographic data, (2) previous clinical learning experiences, (3) current clinical learning experience quality and outcomes, and (4) the opportunity to discuss ethical issues with nurses in the last clinical learning experience (from 0 – 'never' to 3 – 'very much'). Participants and research context: Participants were 9607 undergraduate nursing students who were attending 95 different three-year Italian baccalaureate nursing programmes, located at 27 universities in 15 Italian regions. Ethical considerations: This study was conducted in accordance with the Human Subject Research Ethics Committee guidelines after the research protocol was approved by an ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 4707 (49%) perceived to have discussed ethical issues 'much' or 'very much'; among the remaining, 3683 (38.3%) and 1217 (12.7%) students reported the perception of having discussed, respectively, 'enough' or 'never' ethical issues emerged in the clinical practice. At the multivariate logistic regression analysis explaining 38.1% of the overall variance, the factors promoting ethical discussion were mainly set at the clinical learning environment levels (i.e. increased learning opportunities, self-directed learning, safety and nursing care quality, quality of the tutorial strategies, competences learned and supervision by a clinical nurse). In contrast, being male was associated with a perception of less opportunity to discuss ethical issues. Conclusion: Nursing faculties should assess the clinical environment prerequisites of the settings as a context of student experience before deciding on their accreditation. Moreover, the nursing faculty and nurse managers should also enhance competence with regard to discussing ethical issues with students among clinical nurses by identifying factors that hinder this learning opportunity in daily practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on work as a radical-feminist adult educator and as part of a group of academics from 10 universities who have developed new national qualifications in the Adult Education Community and Training Sector (ACET) for Higher Education in South Africa. The qualification will respond to the training needs of Adult Education Community lecturers and practitioners, and thereby indirectly contribute to the education and training needs of the communities, unemployed adults and youth who require skills to find employment. In the design of this qualification we sought to ensure the inclusion in the qualification of the new policy requirements, critical transformative educational practices, and perspectives from community educators, as well as recent demands from students for a decolonised curriculum. Sometimes these frameworks are in contradiction to one another, particularly in a neo-liberal context in which education has a strong focus on the workplace. I provide evidence from a qualitative study on student motivations to study further that shows that whilst there is a concern with education for skills development to grow the economy, there are still present strong political motivations to learn on the part of students and therefore it is imperative to teach from all these standpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the critical learning dimension in an English for academic purposes (EAP) programme in a British university is developed in the context of one classroom task. The focus is on the speaking element of the activity which requires students in pairs to explore each other’s personal language history (PLH), present the account to the class as a whole, and finally write it up in an academic style as homework. Ethnographic observation and interview data are used to describe the task process in the classroom and the teacher’s and students’ views of it. The pedagogical features of the activity are situated in the programme as a whole, i.e. the institutional specification and the teacher’s introduction in the first session. The learning goals of both the programme and the task are related to current debates on pragmatic and critical approaches in EAP. The classroom and interview data are analysed using a framework for critical learning developed by Robert Young [Critical theory and classroom talk. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1992]. The conclusion discusses the nature and process of critical learning as evidenced by the PLH task, the role of speaking in the development of the critical faculty in the EAP classroom, and how pedagogical approaches in relation to these might benefit from further evaluation and research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]