Building scholarship capacity and transforming nurse educators' practice through institutional ethnography.

Institutional ethnography can be viewed as a method of inquiry for nurse educators to build scholarship capacity and advance the quality of nursing practice. Within a framework of the Boyer (1990) model and the domains of academic scholarship in nursing described by the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (2006), we discuss how a team of nurse educators participated as co-researchers in an institutional ethnographic study to examine the routine work of evaluating nursing students and discovered a contradiction between what was actually happening and what we value as nurse educators. The discovery, teaching, application, and integration dimensions of scholarship are examined for links to our emerging insights from the research and ramifications for our teaching practices. The article illuminates the expertise that developed and the transformations that happened as results of a collaborative institutional ethnography.