NR-393 · Week 7 of 8 · The widening profession: education, research, and new roles

NR-393 Week 7 The Widening Profession: How to Write It

The short answer

NR-393 Week 7, as we read the arc, covers the later twentieth century's widening of the profession: nursing education moving decisively into colleges, nursing research and theory claiming scholarly ground, advanced practice roles emerging from a primary care shortage, and the long, uneven dismantling of the barriers that had kept the profession segregated and almost entirely female. The written work usually asks you to trace one of those widenings into a role or requirement you can point to now. Your section may print this as NR 393 or NR393; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.

NR-393 Week 7 grading scale at Chamberlain, the criterion levels this assessment is scored on, from Chamberlain Tutors
How Chamberlain grades NR-393 Week 7, visualized by Chamberlain Tutors.

What NR-393 Week 7 asks for

On the first Tuesday of the month, a nurse practitioner spends the morning at a skilled nursing facility, seeing residents, adjusting orders, and writing the notes that will keep three of them from an avoidable hospital transfer. Down the hall, the wound nurse changes a dressing according to a protocol built from published research rather than from habit, and the unit's newest hire is finishing a baccalaureate her grandmother's diploma school could never have granted. None of these ordinary facts is old. The prescribing clinician, the research-based protocol, and the college degree are all products of roughly the last third of the twentieth century, and Week 7 asks you to write about how a profession widened itself, on purpose, against resistance, within living memory.

The deliverable at this stage is typically an analytic discussion or paper on one of the era's expansions. The menu is generous: the campaign to move nursing education from hospital apprenticeship into colleges and universities; the building of nursing's own research enterprise, journals, doctoral programs, and eventually a federal research institute; the invention of the nurse practitioner and the growth of the other advanced practice roles; or the desegregation of the profession's schools and associations and the slow reopening of nursing to men. Each of these is a documented struggle with named actors, and each ends inside something you can observe this month. The paper that scores picks one and follows it end to end.

What unifies the week analytically is that every widening was an argument about authority. Who may educate a nurse, and to what level? Who decides what counts as nursing knowledge? Who may diagnose and prescribe? Who may enter the profession at all? Framing your chosen expansion as a contested answer to one of those questions, rather than as inevitable progress, is the difference between a timeline and an analysis, and by this point in the session your grader is scoring for exactly that difference.

The NR-393 Week 7 method, step by step

Six moves for writing one widening from struggle to street address.

  1. Mapping: name the authority question your thread answers

    Education, knowledge, practice, or entry. Open by stating which question your chosen expansion contested and what the answer was before the change. That single framing sentence organizes everything that follows.

  2. Prioritization: choose one expansion and hold it

    The collegiate turn, the research enterprise, advanced practice, or desegregation and reentry. Acknowledge the others in a clause if you must; spend your words on one. Depth on a single documented struggle is what the rubric can reward.

  3. Documentation: find the founding argument, cited

    Each widening produced position papers, reports, and public statements arguing for the change. Cite at least one primary or well-documented secondary account of the case reformers made, and quote no more than a phrase of it.

  4. Correlation: connect the change to its external pressures

    Primary care shortages, federal funding streams, the civil rights movement, and the changing economics of hospitals all pushed on nursing from outside. One or two cited sentences linking your thread to its outside pressure show historical thinking rather than professional folklore.

  5. Personalization: land the expansion in a requirement you face

    Your own BSN coursework, the research base under a protocol you follow, or the advanced practice clinician who rounds where you work is the living end of your thread. Describe it concretely and argue the connection; do not leave the reader to infer it.

  6. Anticipation: name what remains unfinished

    Entry-level education is still debated, the workforce still does not mirror the population it serves, and practice authority still varies by state. One cited sentence acknowledging the unfinished edge sets up the course's final synthesis and reads as judgment, not complaint.

A layout and word budget for an expansion paper

The frame below fits an analytic piece of roughly 750 to 950 words following one late-century widening of the profession. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your section's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.

SectionWhat belongs in itWord target
The authority questionWhich contested question your expansion answered, and what the answer was before, stated as the paper's frame.70 to 100
The case for changeThe argument reformers actually made, drawn from a cited founding document or account.140 to 170
The outside pressuresThe shortage, movement, or funding stream that made the change winnable in its decade, cited.120 to 150
The fight and the compromiseWho resisted, what they argued, and what the achieved version conceded compared with the proposed one.150 to 190
The living endThe requirement, role, or protocol you can observe now, described concretely and argued back to the expansion.150 to 180
The unfinished edgeWhat the widening has not yet settled, one cited sentence, then a close returning to the authority question.80 to 110

Evidence craft for late-century professional history

Recent history still needs citations, maybe more of them. Events within living memory feel citable from general knowledge, and that feeling is a trap. The founding of a program, the date of a landmark report, or the first class of a new role all carry years that sources disagree about at the margins; cite each one as carefully as you cited the nineteenth century.

Distinguish the first from the influential. Late-century nursing is full of contested firsts: first program, first journal, first doctoral degree. Historians often care less about which was technically first than about which version spread. When sources disagree, say so in a clause and cite both; that sentence reads as research, not indecision.

Treat demographic claims as data claims. Statements about how the profession's composition changed, by race, by gender, by degree level, are statistical claims and need a source with a year attached, ideally a workforce survey or a historian summarizing one. Trend words like increasingly are not evidence.

Let opponents speak accurately. The resistance to collegiate education, to advanced practice, and to desegregation made arguments that are themselves documented. Representing an opposing argument fairly, with a citation, before showing how it was answered is the single most efficient way to demonstrate analysis in this week's territory.

Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory

  • The inevitability story. Writing as if education, research, and advanced practice simply arrived on schedule erases the documented fights that are the week's actual subject.
  • Four expansions, one page. Touching every widening guarantees that none of them gets the founding argument, the resistance, and the living end the rubric wants.
  • Folklore firsts. Uncited claims about who or what was first are the most checkable errors available this week, and graders check them.
  • The missing opposition. A struggle narrated without opponents is not a struggle; name who resisted and what they argued, cited.
  • A living end left implicit. Ending in the 1970s and trusting the reader to connect the dots to their own degree hands back the impact points the course exists to award.

Before you submit

  • The authority question frames the paper from the first paragraph
  • One expansion carries the whole piece, with others held to a clause
  • The reformers' case is cited from a founding document or account
  • Outside pressures appear with citations, not as atmosphere
  • The opposition is represented fairly and answered
  • The living end is a requirement or role you describe concretely

Writing the expansion paper for NR-393?

Send the prompt and the rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the struggle documented and the living end argued, and revisions run until the grade lands.

Questions students ask about this stage

Which expansion is easiest to research on a deadline?
The nurse practitioner's origin story is the most compactly documented: a primary care shortage, a nameable first program with a well-recorded founding, decades of scope-of-practice fights, and a living end you can observe anywhere clinicians round, including the facility down the street. The collegiate education campaign is a close second, with the advantage that its living end is the degree you are currently earning, which makes the personalization paragraph almost effortless. Desegregation and reentry history is powerful and well documented but more diffuse, spread across schools, associations, and states, so budget extra reading time if you choose it. Whichever you pick, the test is the same: can you find the founding argument, the opposition, and a dated milestone in one library session?
Can I interview the nurse practitioner where I work instead of citing sources?
Use the observation, not an interview, and keep the evidence published. A sentence describing what an advanced practice clinician does on a monthly round, kept generic and free of any patient detail, is legitimate scene-setting for your living-end paragraph. But the historical claims, when the role emerged, why, against what resistance, must rest on published sources, because one clinician's career memory is testimony, not history, and your rubric's evidence row is asking for the latter. If your section explicitly permits interviews, treat the interview as a personal communication in APA form and still pair every historical claim it touches with a published citation. The double sourcing is not busywork; it is the discipline the whole course has been teaching.
How do I write about the profession's exclusions without making the paper only about them?
Give the thread proportion by giving it precision. If your main line is education or advanced practice, the era's exclusions belong in your paper as documented context: a cited sentence on how segregation shaped who could reach the new degrees, or on how the profession's gender boundary slowed reentry, placed where it genuinely intersects your argument. If desegregation and reentry is your main line, then the proportion inverts and the other expansions become context. What reads poorly is tokenism in either direction: a single throwaway clause bolted onto a triumphal paper, or sweeping condemnation with no cited specifics. Precision, placed where the histories actually intersect, is both the honest and the highest-scoring approach.

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