Interruption, Not Transmission: Denaturalizing Punitive Culture in Nursing Education

Nursing education has documented a punitive culture for 4 decades without stopping its reproduction. This critical theoretical synthesis explains why and proposes a pedagogy of interruption. Inherited professional assumptions reproduce when they are experienced as clinical judgment rather than history. Psychological safety preserves reflexive capacity; interruption renders taken-for-granted practice strange; collective praxis changes what the next learner observes and inherits. Appraisal is the hinge that determines whether destabilization opens reflection or forecloses it. The framework distinguishes interruption from transmission, identifies explicit and modeled routes of reproduction, and generates falsifiable predictions for nursing education research.