Abstract:

As Canadian schools of nursing grapple with a well-documented faculty shortage, a more insidious and largely unnamed crisis is emerging: the systematic erosion of curriculum development expertise. While teaching expertise, the pedagogical skill of facilitating student learning, has long been recognized as a competency distinct from research productivity, curriculum development expertise represents a deeper and rarer form of scholarly knowledge. It encompasses the capacity to design, map, and evaluate coherent program architectures; to align learning outcomes with accreditation standards; to sequence competency development across multiple years; and to integrate emerging evidence into program-level change. This work is not teaching. It is the infrastructure upon which teaching depends and it is absolutely critical.

The urgency of this loss is inseparable from Canada’s aging faculty crisis. In 2018, the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing reported that 41% of nursing faculty employed full-time in Canada were aged 55 and older, with 21% over 60 and eligible for retirement. Senior faculty members carry with them experience, intellectual leadership, and proficient skills that are invaluable in academia as they pass on expertise to the next generation. Yet despite this, universities continue to prioritize research output and grant acquisition in hiring and promotion decisions, systematically undervaluing the accumulated curricular knowledge that senior faculty hold. When these faculty retire, their expertise, often institutional, tacit, and uncodified, leaves with them.

This pattern mirrors a parallel and better-recognized crisis: the academic leadership gap in nursing education. Nurse leader numbers are dwindling as a paucity of qualified nurses are moving into academic nurse leader and administrator roles. This happens not because nurses lack the capacity to lead, but more so due to disproportionate workload and insufficient institutional reward for academic leaders. It was identified more than 15 years ago that nursing academic administration was becoming a role that few wished to assume. The same structural disincentives, heavy service burden, low prestige relative to research, and inadequate recognition, now apply equally to curriculum work.

Together, these twin gaps in leadership succession and in curricular expertise represent a compounding threat to program quality and innovation in Canadian baccalaureate nursing education. This presentation argues that curriculum development expertise must be formally recognized, named, and rewarded within academic nursing structures before its loss becomes irreversible.

Keywords:

Curriculum, education, nursing, development.