What AI Cannot Teach: An Epistemological Reconceptualisation of the Nurse Educator Role Based on an Analysis of Carper's Ways of Knowing

Abstract

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into healthcare and education is transforming how nurses teach, learn and acquire knowledge. Despite this, the nursing literature has largely viewed artificial intelligence as a tool to either adopt or reject, with limited engagement with the deeper epistemological shifts it entails for the nurse educator role. This discursive paper critically examines how artificial intelligence challenges the fundamental ways of knowing that have traditionally defined the work of nurse educators. Using Carper's patterns of knowing in nursing and their subsequent expansions, the analysis considers how each epistemic realm, empirical, aesthetic, personal and ethical, is reshaped when artificial intelligence becomes part of the teaching relationship. It is argued that artificial intelligence does not simply add to the nurse educator's role but fundamentally redefines its epistemological foundations. Four reimagined dimensions of the nurse educator role are introduced: epistemic mediator (empirical knowing), relational anchor (aesthetic and personal knowing), ethical navigator (ethical and sociopolitical knowing) and transformative facilitator (emancipatory knowing), along with an analysis of their implications for nursing education, curriculum development and professional identity.