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Active Nursing a Key to Successful Teaching
Diane Crayton Stays Abreast of the Field by Remaining in the Field
by Lori Gilbert
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Diane Crayton likes to say she “fell into” nursing. And teaching. The associate professor in Stanislaus State’s School of Nursing fell hard.
Nursing and teaching are very much intertwined in her life, like vines of a blossoming bougainvillea plant on a trellis.
“I’m teaching but I also work as a psychiatric and mental health provider one day a week in an outpatient clinic. I need that,” Crayton said. “Anyone who teaches, especially in nursing, really should have their hands in that setting so they can share what’s new and what’s going on, what’s the latest and greatest in this field. I think that’s important to the students. Having an instructor that is currently practicing brings a new dimension to educating the students. Education, knowledge and experience are synonymous.”
That Crayton should find herself guiding a new generation of psychiatric and mental health nurses wasn’t the result of a grand plan. Although being a nurse wasn’t on her radar, the decision fit her well.
Diane was the fifth of 10 children born and raised on the west side of Chicago by a truck-driving father and schoolteacher mother, who both urged their children to get a college education. Crayton joined seven of her siblings in honoring that request.
She ultimately would earn a master’s degree and she chose to become the only sibling to earn a doctorate, but she began her foray into higher education by taking random classes at the University of Illinois with her brother.
“He had some direction. I really didn’t,” Crayton said.
He suggested she become a nurse, not because of any skill set or personality trait he saw in her, but rather because they had an aunt who was a registered nurse.
With the many courses she’d taken at the University of Illinois, Crayton quickly earned an associate degree and nursing certificate from a community college.
She spent 10 years as a medical-surgical nurse in the endocrinology unit at Chicago’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, where beds were often filled with surgical or cancer patients.
“Oncology nursing was not something I could do,” Crayton said. “In nursing, it’s very important that you have really good self-care. You need to be there 100 percent for your patients when you’re working, but when you walk out the door, you need to leave your uniform in the garage and all that other stuff from your day as a nurse and just take care of you. I was having a difficult time separating it.”
She moved to operating-room recovery but became bored with waking up patients from anesthesia and sending them off to their rooms. That wasn’t fulfilling for her, and she knew there was so much more to the profession. The part of nursing she loves, talking and listening to patients, was lacking in her previous roles, and then a mentor led her to psychiatric and mental health nursing.
“When I started working there, a new world in nursing opened up,” Crayton said. “I fell in love with it, and I knew that is what I was meant to do.”
In the late 1980s when Modesto’s Memorial Hospital recruited Crayton to work in its psychiatric facility, she packed her bags, left behind her comfort, security and everything she knew to move across the country to begin a new life and adventure. She embraced everything that California had to offer.
— Diane Crayton
She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1992 as a member of Stan State’s registered nurse to Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, a Master of Science in Nursing from Sonoma State in 2001, and a Doctorate in Nursing Practice in 2014 from Fresno State and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Certificate from Fresno State in 2018.
Crayton encourages her students to continue their education beyond a bachelor’s degree, which is rapidly becoming the minimum requirement for nurses. Advanced degrees mean advanced professional opportunities.
For Crayton, continued education led to new nursing possibilities, but the connections she made proved just as valuable.
They led Crayton to teaching, first at Modesto Junior College, then, in 2004, at Stan State. Although she’s a family nurse practitioner, she chooses to teach psychiatric and mental health nursing.
“Sometimes it’s difficult for students to realize this is a very challenging field,” Crayton said. “You can’t see a person’s mental illness. You have to talk to them, listen to them and observe their behaviors. What’s so wonderful about teaching mental health, is oftentimes students say, ‘I thought they looked just like me. They look normal like me.’ Then they start talking to the patient, and the patient has elaborate stories or they’re responding to internal stimuli. So, you really have to observe behaviors and listen in mental health nursing.
“I think my role is to educate as many people as I possibly can, and to encourage my students. It’s wonderful to see the light come on when students really see what’s happening with these patients. They really understand. I encourage them to help break the stigma, to educate people about what mental illness is really about.”
