Rita D'Aoust treats a patient at St. Joseph's Neighboorhood Center

The Warner School commitment to blending theory and practice has spawned a spirited disciple in Ph.D. candidate Rita F. D’Aoust. From day one, every course spoke to her. Not in a mystical way, but with such clarity that she can reel off just which professor’s knowledge and experience have informed her professional life in nursing.

“From Bruce Kimball, I gained an understanding of education in the health professions,” she begins. “It was Randy Curren who opened up a world of thinking that was very different for me with his philosophy of education course. And from Raffaella Borasi, I studied inquiry learning methods.”

In Curren’s class—as well as from lawyer and faculty member Tyll van Geel—D’Aoust grasped the importance of the “so-what factor.” “Without a clear understanding of the philosophical foundations of an educational program, any curriculum model is flawed and destined for difficulties,” she says. If there’s no answer to so-what, why do it?
D’Aoust ’76N (B.S), ’84N (Mas) has been wrestling with curriculum challenges in her full-time teaching and administrative roles at the University of Rochester School of Nursing since 1990.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in nursing, D’Aoust started as a staff nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital; two years later, she became a nurse manager. She earned her master’s degree in nursing in 1984, and by 1990 she taught nursing at the University of Rochester School of Nursing and assumed administrative and leadership roles in the mid-90s.

Before taking classes at Warner in 1997, she led an overhaul of the School of Nursing undergraduate program, emphasizing community learning and a renewed focus on patient care from birth to death. After she became coordinator of that program in 1995, she continued to refine what it takes to educate a nurse to meet emerging practice demands. Currently, she is director of accelerated bachelor’s and master’s programs for candidates with backgrounds in fields other than nursing.

As more students locally and nationally began turning away from the traditional nursing bachelor’s programs, D’Aoust needed to build a curriculum to attract experienced people in nursing or elsewhere who wanted degrees in a compressed time frame. “I had to know what the program hoped to accomplish and how it compared to others,” she says. So she used her Warner coursework to support the nursing school’s agenda and to mitigate what’s considered a national crisis—the shortage of nurses.

D’Aoust had made site visits to Yale and the University of Texas at Austin to analyze their accelerated programs while simultaneously using the findings from these visits for Warner coursework with Brian Brent. “That laid the foundation to help me understand the business piece of running a program within a private research university,” she says. Later, she benchmarked all the existing accelerated nursing programs in the United States—there were 27 when she did her survey—and validated what she gathered.

The new curriculum was approved in January 2002 and the first 33 students began their studies in late May.

Her first class of bachelor’s candidates pleases her enormously. Some are Peace Corps veterans, another has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and wants to open a nursing home. “For the job satisfaction and the job security, people are choosing nursing,” D’Aoust says. “I think of nursing as a growth industry.”
She tells those students that the new curriculum was designed to add to their knowledge. “That’s where the teaching and curriculum from Warner impacts what I do,” she’s quick to point out. “I recognize the formal education our students have and their experiential learning.”

As for the skills demanded by nursing, D’Aoust makes use of hers regularly. She has assigned hours—for pay and as a volunteer—at St. Joseph’s Neighborhood Center in Rochester, where people with little or no health insurance come for medical care.
“I work. I’m a student. I have children. My idea is to work with you and get you where you want to be,” she tells her students. Candidates can earn a bachelor’s degree in one year and a master’s degree in three.

Students like D’Aoust, who are keen to connect research-based theory with their jobs as educators, impress Borasi, the Warner dean. “Warner is known for fostering an environment that stimulates knowledge and ideas whether they apply to preschool or graduate school,” she says. Completing her doctoral work in teaching and curriculum will be her next academic achievement. At first, D’Aoust felt a little off-kilter with fellow Warner students who are primarily K–12 educators. But she credits David Hursh, her advisor and associate professor at Warner, for helping her focus and make the transition to educational research, and serving as a valuable mentor.

Nursing students and colleagues alike recognize D’Aoust for her commitment to people and to the profession. She has been recognized as an innovator, diligent teacher, caring advisor, and mentor and received the University’s Edward Peck
Curtis Teaching Award in 2002. Colleagues praise D’Aoust for her curriculum achievements and for her creativity in problem solving. She’s also been honored with a professional advancement award from the School of Nursing in 2002, picked as a School of Nursing faculty member of the month in 2001, and selected for the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from the nursing school in 1998.

Decades before those accolades were bestowed, 17-year-old Rita Ferrari enrolled at the University of Rochester. “I was this kid. God knows why the University took me.” Despite her professional modesty, the answer seems apparent in all that D’Aoust has accomplished since then.

Her next goal is to earn a doctorate in 2004, a year before her daughter graduates from college. On days when work and school demands are high, D’Aoust glances at a snapshot of herself and her Warner mentor. The sun is shining and they are standing at a recent commencement on Eastman Quadrangle. She wears academic garb, but not a doctoral robe and soft-cornered velvet cap. Soon she’ll have met that challenge, too, in the same energetic way she has conquered all the others.