Academic News

Research is an integral part of the Nursing Department. From Research and Innovation Day, to an instructor writing group, to publications, the instructors in the Nursing Department continue to show their passion for and commitment to research.

Congratulations to instructors Kim Mitchell and Tom Harrigan, along with Torrie Stefansson and Holly Setlack, on their latest publication! Their article “Exploring Self-Efficacy and Anxiety in First-Year Nursing Students Enrolled in a Discipline-Specific Scholarly Writing Course” has recently been published in the Journal Quality Advancement in Nursing Education.

To read their article, click here.

SES Talk Posters – CAHRD May 5 SA rev3Winnipeg’s largest Indigenous employment agency will
be on campus to discuss employment supports and
services, as well as their career fast-track program,
which matches job-ready Indigenous candidates with top
Winnipeg employers.

Please Read the Attachment for more details!

L-R Maddison Tokar-Wolff, Kaleigh Henrikson, James Gibson, Josh Pruden, Mitch Proctor.

Graduates of the Red River Teacher Education are bringing their innovative lesson ideas into the classrooms at Steinbach Regional Secondary School.  Five of our recent grads are currently employed at this Comprehensive school.  Overall, about 20 RRC grads are contributing to the technical Vocational, Industrial Arts and Business programs, including Vice Principal James Gibson .  See the link below to read the full story.

See more here →

Kathleen Mira, who graduated from the Red River Teacher Education Business and Technology program is one of several RRC grads featured in the 2017 Eye to the Sky Billboard Campaign.

Read all about it here →

A graduate of the Red River College’s Business?Technology Teacher Education program, Mira has taught at Technical Vocational High School in Winnipeg West End since 1999.

Mira has taught it all at Tec-Voc, from computer and software applications to accounting principles and systems to retailing, promotions and entrepreneurship, and everything in between.  She says her time at RRC prepared her well for the multi-faceted and ever changing world of business.

Read more on Ms. Mira here

Red River College is committed to enhancing mental health programming for students, staff, and faculty. On March 22nd, TSN’s Michael Landsberg presented at the college to help raise awareness of mental health through his #SICKNOTWEAK talk.

Michael is one of the faces of Bell Let’s Talk Day, in which Bell contributed 5¢ towards mental health initiatives by counting every text, call, tweet, Instagram post, Facebook video view, and Snapchat geofilter.

If you were unable to attend the live #SICKNOTWEAK presentation, you can watch it on-demand here.

We were pleased to welcome 11 students to Red River Teacher Education for the morning of Thursday March 23rd.  It was such a pleasure to meet some of our youth as excited about learning as we are about teaching!  Thank you to Raman Job from MTS for providing us with the wonderful movie about the day.

Click on the video below!

Attention Civil and Construction Management Students,

Have some of you recently secured a co-op position that requires completion of the ACI Level 1 Concrete Field Testing Technician course?

Please sign up as soon as possible, as space is limited.

The course will run in the CARSI Lab from May 1st to May 4th, 2017.
The cost is $420.00 CDN payable now or on the first day the class. Registration Forms are available in the Civil Co-op office (Room A1-28).

Congratulations to Nursing instructor, Kim Mitchell, on receiving the Bravo Award for Research Excellence!

The Research Excellence award recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in support of applied research, contributed to establishing an environment that welcomes research, supports others in their research endeavours, and or made an outstanding contribution to a course/project/program/community partner. This award recognizes Kim’s contribution not only to nursing research but to a culture of research within the Nursing Department.

In addition to being a career nurse educator, Kim’s focus of study is a topic applicable to nursing education – exploring writing self-efficacy and its impact on writing performance in undergraduate nursing students. Writing self-efficacy is a concept that has been demonstrated to predict student grades and is thought to be a more powerful predictor of student performance than writing ability. Writing assignments are thought to contribute to student knowledge and critical thinking skills, which has the potential to positively affect student ability to communicate within multidisciplinary teams using the language of evidenced informed practice. Additionally, writing assignments are thought to benefit student ability to integrate theoretical knowledge within their clinical experiences; however, there has been little empirical testing to explore this hypothesis within the discipline of nursing.

Kim’s interest in exploring writing self-efficacy in nursing students began in 2011 when she initiated a pilot study to assess the effectiveness of the discipline specific scholarly writing course that she developed for the RRC nursing baccalaureate program.  The study was a pretest posttest design study, which measured writing self-efficacy and anxiety in first year students before and after their first-year scholarly writing course.  The description of this study and the course content it investigates has been accepted and will be published in the journal Quality Advancements in Nursing Education for spring 2017.

In 2013, she repeated this initial study and expanded the original one group quasi-experimental design to include a time control period. A comparison between online and classroom writing instruction experiences was also assessed. A portion of this cohort of students also participated in a long-term follow up study in the 2015-2016 academic year and that project is currently in data analysis.  With a team of colleagues, Kim has also conducted an in-depth analysis of existing writing self-efficacy tools published in the literature in order to understand the conceptual constructs used to measure writing self-efficacy. This project has been accepted by the Journal of Nursing Measurement to be published along with an editorial on the subject in or around August 2017.

It became evident, after four research projects in this area, that doctoral education was the next step in the advancement of Kim’s research knowledge and skills. She applied and was accepted to the doctor of nursing program at the University of Manitoba for the fall of 2016. She is currently completing coursework toward this goal. The writing self-efficacy tool used to measure the concept in her three previous studies was one of her own creation and was designed to measure aspects of writing self-efficacy specific to the scholarly writing course she was delivering. As a result, her goal in the doctoral program is to redevelop and test this scale for more general use within nursing education. One of her first doctoral assignments exploring academic writing voice from the perspectives of objectivity and feminism has been accepted for publication in Nursing Inquiry.