Denise King

Denise King, Senior Lecture with the Elizabeth T. MacNeil School of Nursing, came to Dominican University as a full-time faculty member in the fall of 2016. Denise has almost four decades of nursing clinical and leadership experience in a variety of practice settings. She is an experienced nurse educator for 37 years in patient education, staff development, and academia. Denise’s teaching philosophy focuses on effective learning through consistent student-centered support through discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge to develop and evolve themselves in mind, body, and spirit. She believes students learn through a spirit of inquiry that is cultivated through effective teaching. In professional nursing education this leads to valuing life-long learning in the pursuit of evidence-based practice.

Denise approaches her students as unique individuals deserving to be treated with dignity, respect, and fairness. Embracing individuals’ differences and the diversity of unique holistic persons cultivates students’ inherent right to autonomy within the learning environments (classroom, lab, clinical unit) and within their individual quest for knowledge. Treating students with respect, dignity, and fairness promotes students to develop critical thinking skills cultivating leaders in nursing practice, research, and scholarship to focus on safe, patient-centered, inclusive, and holistic nursing care.

Upholding the traditions of nursing as a science and an art, Denise uses a variety of approaches to promote nursing leadership in practice, scholarship, excellence, and global engagement through lecture, team-based learning strategies, problem-solving case studies, role playing, Socratic questioning to promote critical thinking, high- and low-fidelity simulation activities, clinical experiences, and a variety of technologically based individual learning.