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Guided to a Helping Profession
For Kathy Pfaff, getting to the point where she was leading the redesign of the UWindsor Nursing curricula was a natural progression, along with a mix of good timing.
Pfaff was six years old when her father, who had held a leadership position in the Lutheran Church, felt his gift was in the parish, so he relocated the entire family from Western Canada to serve in Windsor. Her parents were very hospitable. She remembers her house as a place where people gathered and everyone was always welcome, including the odd homeless person that needed a meal.
She attended Oakwood Public School, which she described as a community-focused, hands-on learning environment. The school featured a nature sanctuary and a barn where students could care for animals. Pfaff even served as a tour guide, leading visiting students from other schools on tours. “I would talk about the nature sanctuary, the types of plants that grew there, and how the ecosystem was maintained,” she said.
In high school, Pfaff described herself as a well-rounded student who enjoyed art and art history, languages, and the sciences, but when it came down to deciding on a career path, she knew Nursing would be a good fit. “It’s that analogy of nursing being an art and a science. When I looked at the type of courses nurses had to take, and I looked at the role that nurses do, I thought, yeah, this reflects the gifts that I have.”
She also gives credit to her parents. “I think seeing my parents in helping roles, in helping professions, it drew me towards nursing. My siblings as well, we ended up in helping professions, and none of it by design.”
Initially, she saw nursing as a gateway to something bigger, possibly a path to medical school (at the time nurse practitioners didn’t exist). However, once she entered the nursing program, she realized it was exactly where she was meant to be.
When Pfaff became a student in Nursing in the 1980s at the University of Windsor, it was under the Faculty of Science. She said up to 100 students were admitted into the program and around 75 graduated. “When I started, it was mostly women, white, middle class, with two male students and only one graduating.”
She said she had the opportunity to cross the border into Michigan to do clinical experiences as a student, something she is hoping students can do again after 9-11 stopped the practice. “It was very eye opening to cross the border in the 1980s because I have to say that I grew up quite sheltered. I remember being a student in my last year and having a patient that was in the ICU that was Jane Doe. I couldn’t contemplate that that there could be somebody in the ICU and doesn’t have a name and nobody’s wondering where they are. We wouldn’t see that in a Windsor hospital back then.”
After graduating, she married and both she and her husband moved to London where she landed her first nursing job at the University Hospital, now London Health Sciences Center, where she worked in a collaborative environment alongside physicians and other health care disciplines.
“There was lots of learning going on, great mentorship, and opportunities to get into leadership positions,” she said. “It was a teaching hospital, so there were opportunities for advancing your education and knowledge. They invested in nurses. So, you could work there and continue your education. You worked side-by-side with doctors-in-training. If there were opportunities to come off the unit and sit in on a seminar, you got to do that.”
Pfaff definitely took advantage of those opportunities, working in various roles such as cardiovascular and thoracic surgery and working in the transplant program where she learned to make challenging ethical decisions, such as who would be recommended to receive organ transplants.
After about six years later, her husband had a career opportunity to move back to Windsor. With parents, family, and friends here, the decision to move was an easy one. Rather than work in a hospital setting in Windsor, she opted to work as a case manager at VON, a community-based Home Care Program. At the time, the VON organized all of the care needed by patients to remain in their homes.
Working in community care introduced other aspects of health to Kathy’s mostly acute care perspective. As a case manager, she visited patients in their homes, where she saw firsthand how social factors affected health. “I would go into apartments downtown and see that there was no food in these people’s houses, and many didn’t have family to help them.”
This experience gave her insight into patients’ lives beyond simply addressing their symptoms. “A person’s health is often connected to their social circumstances—like their living conditions, family situation, income, and social status,” she said. “Being out in the community allows you to see this firsthand.”
A Career in Academia
After about 5 years of working at VON, an unexpected opportunity arose that would once again alter Pfaff’s career trajectory. She received a call inviting her to join the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Nursing as a sessional instructor.
“Teaching has always mattered to me. My mom was a teacher, and our home was like a classroom. I hadn’t thought about really having a career in academia, but in a sense, I was already teaching. Nurses teach every day – to patients and families, when orienting new staff, or being paired with a nursing student for your shift.”
She worked as a sessional instructor for five years, a role that offered the flexibility she needed to care for her four young children. During this period, she also completed a thesis-based master’s degree.
As she was completing her master’s degree, a full-time position became available in the Faculty of Nursing’s new simulation lab, that was being developed by Judy Bornais. “The sim lab, regarded as one of the best in Ontario, if not Canada, was growing and there was a need for a second person in that role.”
She was able to secure the position, thanks in part to her newly earned credentials. However, two years later, she felt the pull to continue her education. “It was Christmas break, and I started surfing PhD programs and landed on McMaster’s website. We didn’t have a PhD in nursing here at the time and I thought, yeah, I need to do this.”
“I love school, I love education. Working at a university and teaching clinically, I was surrounded by mentors who held PhDs. It was inspiring to learn alongside people with such advanced education.”
After a year of commuting to Hamilton for her PhD, she made the bold decision to leave the stability of her full-time, permanent lab position and apply for a limited-term appointment (LTA). She remembers her dean asking if she was sure she wanted to do this. “I took this big risk that I would apply to a limited term position with the idea that I’d be able to build my teaching in theory courses.”
As luck had it, the timing worked out. Right around the time her LTA was done, and she finished her PhD, a tenure-track position became available that she was successful in getting. “The timing worked out. I have to be honest; I didn’t know what I was doing, but it all worked out.”
Teaching at UWindsor
Pfaff said she sees herself as a humanistic-existentialist. The essence of her teaching philosophy is that she believes teaching and learning is relational and that students and teachers share in the learning process. “People cannot learn unless they enter the relationship. Teachers won’t be successful unless they nurture the relationships and teachers and learners are both accountable for learning.”
She said she is also a pragmatist. “Not everything I try will work. I am constantly shifting to get rid of what isn’t working and finding something that will work with students or better meets their needs.”
She said she uses case studies and lots of examples to help students achieve an understanding of course lessons. For example, she and a colleague teach a new palliative care course they created, one of the first of its kind in Canada, that she is especially proud of.
With nursing being a practice discipline, we align the learning objectives and the theory with the cases, she said. “In our palliative care course, we designed a case that unfolds across the semester. The case involves a gentleman who has pancreatic cancer. His journey unfolds throughout the course to teach students about communicating with a person who has received bad news, through how to support the person’s psychosocial and spiritual needs, managing his pain and symptoms as his disease progresses, and finally his last hours and days.”
The course can be heavy at times, so she tries to incorporate humour where she can. “Everyone needs to have a laugh or at least a chuckle every day. Life is not easy for students and faculty. Sometimes we need to take a step back and reflect on the joy in learning and living.” She also uses reflection as a teaching method. “In our palliative care course, we begin with a daily reflection – an Indigenous blessing, a poem, a video, a story. It’s meant to ground both the students in their learning and us in our teaching, allowing us to set everything else aside and focus on why we’re here and what we’re about to learn.”
She said one of the biggest rewards is seeing students succeed and then having a thirst for more education. “Over the past few weeks, I have received numerous requests from former students for references for graduate school and that inspires me – to know that they are taking that leap. These are the people who will be leading the profession in the future and advancing nursing science.”
Redesigning the Nursing Curriculum
Pfaff won the Educational Leadership award in 2023 because of her leadership role in developing the theoretical underpinnings, concepts, and major revisions of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing curriculum. “I am incredibly humbled because truly there was a team of people who rolled up their sleeves to do the work. I certainly didn’t and couldn’t have done it alone. This award belongs to everyone who worked on our curricula.”
She said the curriculum had become a “big animal” as the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (CASN), which accredits the Faculty of Nursing, and the College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO), which sets the standards for what nurses do in practice, keeps adding to what needed to be taught because nursing is always evolving as a profession, along with the health care system in which nurses work.
“We had been plugging holes for years. We knew we had to start from scratch, start from a framework and integrate what our professional bodies are telling us. We wanted to become the gold standard in nursing education.”
It was a major undertaking that took about 7 years to complete. “We met for years, every week as a curriculum committee to design it,” she said. “We began with a broad framework and then identified which courses would fit within it. From there, we collaborated with instructors, guiding them to design the courses while aligning with our leveled outcomes. This process involved creating a curriculum map, defining course descriptions, and establishing clear learning outcomes.”
The result: “Our undergraduate program is now concept-based with twelve concepts integrated throughout our theory, lab, and experiential learning courses. Each concept is levelled to increase in complexity and level of mastery in course and weekly outcomes, as well as in lectures and assignments. We wanted to make sure we were preparing students for the roles that they were going to undertake.”
Once the undergraduate program was complete, Pfaff set her sights on redesigning the Master’s program, which just passed through Senate in the spring of 2023. Her next project? To lead the redesign of the Nursing PhD program.
She shares her enthusiasm for the work, describing it as both fascinating and deeply fulfilling. “I love this kind of work because it ties back to why I chose nursing in the first place. It’s technical, evidence-based, and rooted in science, but it also requires creativity—there’s an art to it. It’s captivating to examine the whole picture and figure out how all the pieces fit together.”
Peter brings extensive expertise in multimedia to support CTL programs, website design, and special events. With around 25 years of experience in graphic and web design, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. He is a graduate of Print Journalism and Digital Media from Conestoga College, and and Communication, Media and Film from the University of Windsor.
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