Marjorie J. Smith Scholarship

In August 2019, the Marjorie J. Smith Scholarship was established with the Winona State University Foundation to support and encourage Graduate Nursing students who are interested in teaching.

Criteria
1. Each recipient must be a Graduate Nursing student enrolled full-time or part-time and in good standing at Winona State University;
2. Each recipient must be a demonstrate interest in teaching, as a nurse educator or as an important part of their role as a nurse. Related to this requirement, each applicant will answer the following questions:

• What teaching-related experiences have you had?
• How will teaching play a role in your career as a nurse?

Background and Motivation
Marjorie J. Smith is an Emerita Professor of Nursing at Winona State University, where she helped plan and develop the Master’s Program in Nursing and served as the program’s first director. Dr. Smith received her baccalaureate degree in nursing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her master’s degree in childbearing/childrearing family nursing and doctorate in adult education are from the University of Minnesota. She is a certified nurse-midwife.

Dr. Smith taught medical-surgical nursing, pediatric nursing, and obstetrical nursing at the undergraduate level in diploma, associate degree, and baccalaureate programs. She also taught graduate courses in nursing theory, research, women’s health care, instruction and evaluation, nursing informatics, and health care technology and computers. She did pioneering research on the Centering Pregnancy model of group prenatal care that is now widely promoted by the Centering Health Care Institute.

Dr. Smith was chief editor of the textbook, Child and Family: Concepts of Nursing Practice, published by McGraw-Hill. She was also one of three authors of the book, Introduction to Computers for Healthcare Professionals, of which the 6th edition was published in 2014. In addition, she wrote a computer assisted learning program, The Client Using the Birth Control Pill, published by Medi-Sim.

Dr. Smith received the Outstanding Educator Award from Mayo School of Health-Related Sciences in 1998. In 2000, she received the Outstanding Nurse Educator award from the Minnesota Association of Colleges of Nursing. In 2009, Dr. Smith was selected as one of the 100 distinguished alumni of the University of Minnesota’s School of Nursing in celebration of its centennial. Outstanding individuals were selected from 8,500 living alumni who were deemed to have made great achievements to advance health care or were doing significant work in the nursing profession that has had a profound impact on families, communities, the school, or the nursing profession. Dr. Smith created this scholarship to continue to support the education of future nurse educators.