Faculty Spotlight
Sarah Freeman
Betty Tigner Turner Clinical Professor of Nursing
Sarah Freeman is the Betty Tigner Turner Clinical Professor of Nursing and director of both the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program and a combined Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner and Adult Nurse Practitioner Program. She is also on the faculty of the Emory Center for Ethics. Freeman joined Emory in 1975 as the Family Planning Nurse Practitioner Trainer. Her main research and scholarly interests are healthcare ethics and women’s care. Among her many awards and honors are the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award (2008), the Wysocki National Leadership Award in Women’s Health (2007), and a Fellow of the Woodruff Leadership Academy (2005).
The following is a condensed version of an interview with Professor Freeman from March 3, 2010:
What attracted you to teaching?
A lot of it was because of a home economics teacher in high school who had a big influence on my life. I thought about teaching simply because of her. Teaching by itself was of interest to me, and healthcare was of interest to me, so the teaching of healthcare made sense. The biggest impact you make in your career is when you guide other people to make impacts in the field in which you’re interested in. That’s what attracted me to teaching. I really enjoy watching other people learn and watching other people discover and become excited about something I have enjoyed all my life.
Can you summarize your philosophy of teaching?
I think my philosophy of education centers around the field I’m in: education is about leading people to learn to think and to move forward. Education should be engaging in whatever it is you’re teaching. You should be able to fully engage students in that area so they begin to think for themselves, and also make them want to learn more, and leading them to have that intellectual curiosity that makes them lifelong learners.
How has your philosophy of education evolved over the years?
I think it’s matured a lot. When learning, people have to be responsible for themselves, and my job is to make sure that students are interested in that process. Early on in my career, I was a lot more interested in making sure they learned everything that I knew. I was giving them the facts as opposed to showing them the way to learn. Of course I have to transmit facts, but part of that transmission is to get them engaged also. I thought if I could just tell them everything they needed to know, they’d be OK, and my philosophy has changed from “this is what I have to tell them” to “this is how I have to help them be able to be engaged and learn for themselves.”
What advice would you give to a new professor or instructor in your field?
Find that area in teaching and scholarship that you have a passion about. Let that passion show, and let the students in on the secret of whatever it is you have a passion about. A huge part of teaching is that you have to give of yourself to the students and you have to be available to them. When you do that the student learns more from you, and you also grow as a teacher. Give a part of yourself to your students, which is a tough thing sometimes.
What matters how you relate to them: your interest in them and their ability to see the things you do well and don’t do well. I knew I had become and OK teacher the first time a student asked me a question and I said “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer,” and didn’t feel bad about it. I think that’s a growth mark. As a new teacher, you feel you have to know everything or the students will think you don’t know anything. That’s certainly not true.
Students must feel safe to be able to learn. I want them involved, and if they’re involved they’re not going to always be right, and if they’re afraid to be wrong then there’s going to be a problem. Creating that safe environment that allows a dialogue between the teacher and the student is critical to creating scholars.
What in your field are you passionate about?
Ethics. My passion is looking at what goes on within the healthcare arena and are we doing the right things, for instance, the ethics surrounding the provision of healthcare. As far as a clinical area, I’m interested in the care of women, especially regarding chronic diseases: how does it affect them and how is it different for women? That’s also where my scholarship is focused.
How would you like your students to remember you after they’ve left Emory?
I want them to remember that they had a teacher that provided the tools for to be able to practice or whatever it is they decide to do. I’d rather that they appreciate me five years down the road than at the end of a course. I want them to look back and say “she gave me what I needed to succeed in my profession. She helped make it possible for me to be where I am today.”
How has nursing education changed in the past five to ten years?
The biggest changes have been in the changing role of the nurse. It has gone from being strictly a helping profession for the rest of healthcare to being an independent field unto itself. We now look at the science behind what we do, and we don’t base everything we know on medical science. There’s also a science of nursing. We also are the discipline that has the most contact with patients, so rather than the traditional role of doing what we’re told, it’s a role of finding out what is the best thing to do and then do it and inform the rest of the healthcare field.
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