| Summary: | The gap between what is taught in college, and its application in practice, is the subject of much debate in the nursing literature. The reform of pre-registration nursing education, known as Project 2000, was the latest professional attempt to close this gap. There has, however, been very little in-depth debate about the degree of curriculum integration, the extent to which the internal logic of the contributing disciplines should be maintained, and the responsibility for teaching them. This study seeks to illuminate this problem by using research methods which will uncover student and teacher conceptions of learning to integrate theory and practice. Contextual analysis, a methodology within the phenomenographic tradition developed by Svensson (1976), was chosen as the research approach. It assumes that the meaning of the data depends on the context in which they were collected. The students in the study say that their learning is enhanced by teachers who have subject expertise, whether in nursing or the contributing disciplines; that they can learn better from their peers than from their teachers; and that they need to develop a base of knowledge of the contributing disciplines before they can go on to integrate them. These are complex issues, however, and there is a need for further exploration and clarification but the conclusions from this study will contribute to the debate and can help the development of nursing curricula which will present theory and practice as an integrated whole.
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