Supervising culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) nursing students: A challenge for clinical educators

• CALD students are perceived as needful and deficitarian.
• Clinical educators experience challenges when working with CALD students.
• Educators need support to work with these students in educationally sound ways.
• CALD students themselves can become a valuable source of support.

This paper presents and discusses the challenges faced by a group of clinical educators in teaching and assessing nursing students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds in Australian English-speaking hospitals. A questionnaire was administered to eight university-appointed clinical educators external to the clinical venues in order to find out what issues they had experienced with CALD students and how they had responded to them. The educators' responses were contextualised with the perspectives of 19 CALD students who responded to a student questionnaire, and analysed using Yoder's (1996) framework of instructional responses to ethnically diverse students. It was found that the clinical educators encountered difficulties in responding to CALD students with an instructional response that was not patronising, assimilationist or demeaning for the students. The findings suggest that most educators would have benefitted from targeted support by the school of nursing to develop a pedagogically appropriate approach to interacting with CALD students. This study points to the need for continuing education in cross-cultural communication for nurses working in clinical education roles and provides ideas to this respect that build on CALD students' strengths and participants' suggestions.