Mihkai Wickline always knew she wanted to be a nurse.
“From the time I was 2, if you asked me what I was going be when I grew up, it was a nurse,” said Wickline. “That Fisher-Price medical kit was my favorite toy.”
She never wavered from that goal. At 14 she volunteered in a hospital, delivering flowers and meals to patients. Two years later she started working as a certified nursing assistant and later went on to become a registered nurse.
“I just felt at home,” she said about those early experiences. “I still feel at home anytime I go to a hospital… It’s just a place that makes sense to me and I feel like I belong.”
She now channels her lifelong love of nursing into her work as an Assistant Teaching Professor at the UW School of Nursing. Her hope is that she can inspire a similar love for the profession in her students.
“Nursing is like a best friend to me,” said Wickline. “I hope that being taught by somebody who feels that way about their profession will be really life-giving and sustaining.”
Recently, Wickline was awarded the UW School of Nursing Rheba de Tornyay Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, in recognition of her outstanding teaching at the school.
According to the UW School of Nursing, “the Rheba de Tornyay Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award recognizes a faculty member who inspires creative and critical thinking, fosters dynamic learning environments, integrates evidence-based practices, and honors students as active partners in their education.”
“What I care most about is that [students] can demonstrate the competency of being caring,” said Wickline. “Caring is not just something that you feel, it’s something that you do.”
She also believes caring is something that can be taught. She leads students in practice scenarios to build their communication skills. And she’s always looking for ways to bring a human element into the classroom.
“I try to use a lot of first-hand patient accounts, poetry, novels, my own stories from years of practice, [and] memoirs in my teaching,” said Wickline. “Because if you can feel something, you will learn better than if you just hear something.”
That kind of creativity in teaching is one of the things that makes Wickline a stellar instructor, and it’s one of her favorite things about the job. She’s had students draw a patient’s journey learning to manage their ostomy bag like a treasure map, act out the chain of infection, and watch videos from pop culture as examples of how nurses communicate.
Prior to teaching in academia, she worked as a Clinical Nurse Specialist and frequently taught practicing nurses. She sought to be creative then, too, and published a board game through the Oncology Nursing Society that helped teach nurses how to give chemotherapy.
“I’m always trying to tap into different ways to learn,” said Wickline.
Those types of educational activities have also helped her rise to one of the challenges of her current classes, which meet in 3-hour blocks.
“Nobody can listen to me talk for three hours,” said Wickline. “That would not be a fun way to learn, and that’s not how things stick.”
Sometimes the students are hesitant initially, when the classroom learning takes a different form of learning than they are used to. Being an active learner requires more work than passively receiving a lecture.
“I know some students are like, wait, what are we doing today?” said Wickline. “There’s pens and poster board and string on all the desks, I don’t know about this.”
But afterwards, those activities end up being the ones students say were most memorable.
Ultimately, even beyond helping her students become knowledgeable, caring nurses, Wickline’s greatest hope for her students is that they feel a deep sense of belonging at the UW school of nursing and know that there is a place for them in the wonderful career that is nursing.
“Some of our students might not always feel like they belong; imposter syndrome is real,” said Wickline. “But if they landed in a seat at UW School of Nursing, they belong here. And I want them to feel like they belong, like they’re a special guest at the party!”