Profile of Dr. Cynthia Clark
Dr. Clark is an award winning tenured professor, professor emeritus, consultant for ATI Nursing Education, and the founder of Civility Matters®. Dr. Clark serves as a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the National League for Nursing Academy of Nursing Education. She served as a co-chair for the American Nurses Association Professional Panel for Incivility, Bullying, and Workplace Violence. Her groundbreaking work on fostering civility has brought national and international attention to the controversial issues of incivility in academic and work environments. Her theory-driven interventions, empirical measurements, theoretical models, and reflective assessments provide “best practices” to prevent, measure, and address uncivil behavior and to create healthy workplaces.
Dr. Clark’s presentations number in the hundreds and her publications have appeared in several peer-reviewed and open-access venues. She is a member of the editorial review board for Nurse Educator and a reviewer for several peer-reviewed nursing journals. She is the recipient of numerous teaching, research, and service awards including the 2011 and 2012 Most Inspirational Professor Award, the 2011 NLN Excellence in Educational Research Award, the 2013 Journal of Nursing Education (JNE) Christine A. Tanner Scholarly Writing Award. Her book, Creating and Sustaining Civility in Nursing Education, received the 2013 AJN Book of the Year award for Professional Issues in Nursing and is a must-read for all educators and practitioners. Dr. Clark has been a professional blogger (Musing of the great blue) for Sigma Theta Tau International, Reflections on Nursing Leadership since 2010. Her 2014 posting, ‘It was the Nurses’ was selected for a special 2014 Year-End Sampler by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI).
Dr. Clark’s research involves preparing future nurses to address incivility in the practice setting, bridging the gap between nursing education and practice-based nurses to create and sustain cultures of civility, faculty-to-faculty incivility, student stress, coping, and pursuance of academic civility, and ongoing intervention studies including a biomarker study to measure the effectiveness of cognitive rehearsal as a means to mitigate stress during uncivil encounters. Her empirical instruments to measure incivility and ways to promote civility have been translated into several languages and have been used to conduct studies in the United States, Israel, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, the People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, Jordan, Canada, Uganda, Korea, Ecuador, and Pakistan. Dr. Clark has served as a committee member and content expert for several graduate student studies both nationally and internationally; many have used her empirical instruments in their doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and other scholarly works.
Dr. Clark also is well known for her expertise in the area of scholarly teaching, learner-centered pedagogies, and active learning. For the past several years, Dr. Clark has used live theater actors, simulation, and student-produced and directed YouTube videos as active learning strategies to promote student engagement and deep learning. Her article on the use of live actors as a teaching strategy to address incivility in the practice setting published in Clinical Simulation in Nursing has been downloaded 740 times by readers from the US, Turkey, Taiwan, China, Australia, and the UK since its release in June 2014. In her role as a Teaching Scholar for Faculty Learning Communities, Dr. Clark facilitated the development of several early career faculty members in their growth as scholarly educators and learner-centered teachers, and has conducted numerous classroom assessments to assist faculty improve their pedagogical approaches.
Dr. Clark spends her leisure time kickboxing, hiking, biking, cooking and reading. She especially enjoys spending time with her family and numerous rescue pets.