Merging culture and technology, award-winning prof Luz Miguel integrates civility and AI into nursing education
At the core of her teaching and research, Associate Professor Miguel applies the Aloha Spirit, showing students how to integrate civility and AI into nursing education.
By Susan Enright/UH Hilo Stories.
The recent recipient of the Koichi and Taniyo Taniguchi Award for Excellence and Innovation, given out annually at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo to honor a faculty member’s creativity in teaching and scholarship, is helping change nursing education and workforce needs not just here in Hilo but also nationally.
Luzviminda Miguel is an associate professor of nursing based at UH Hilo’s School of Nursing with an area of expertise and research in clinical and policy approaches for obstetric clinical practice, healthcare policy, and community asthma management. This includes a focus on academic-related inquiries into nursing education, student incivility, and AI integration in teaching.
Miguel, who served as a licensed practical nurse at the now-named Hilo Benioff Medical Center in the 1990s and then as a registered nurse at Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children on Oʻahu in the early 2000s, received her master in nursing education in 2012 from Walden University based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her doctor of nursing practice in 2016 from UH Mānoa.
Following her position as an associate professor of nursing (a rank she achieved in 2022) and division chair of nursing and allied health at Hawaiʻi Community College, she arrived at UH Hilo in 2024. Less than two years later, she received the prestigious Taniguchi award.
“I want to ensure our local health needs are met with a seamless blend of rigorous clinical expertise and genuine, place-based care”
Associate Professor Miguel says her choice of expertise is deeply personal.
“Living here in Volcano, I see firsthand how intimately our physical environment shapes our collective well-being,” she says. “My own family navigates the daily realities of asthma, and when you live in a place where Kīlauea’s eruptions constantly introduce vog and ash into your own backyard, public health stops being an abstract textbook concept. It becomes the literal air my loved ones and my neighbors breathe. That is what drives me every single day. I want to ensure our local health needs are met with a seamless blend of rigorous clinical expertise and genuine, place-based care.”
Miguel’s significant contributions to the literature began early with her master’s thesis on “Using Simulation Role Play in Nursing Healthcare Policy and Politics,” which earned the Sigma Theta Tau Best Poster Award in Minneapolis 2013.
She later completed her doctoral thesis on the development of the Kaʻū Community Asthma Management Program (KCAMP), which earned her the UH Mānoa Dean’s Research Award of the Year and a 2020 publication in Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal. Among her most important findings during the development of the program, she discovered that a bottom-up, community-participatory model was significantly more effective at managing asthma in rural, underserved populations than traditional, top-down clinical approaches.
“By prioritizing community participation over standard clinical mandates, the KCAMP program proved that rural healthcare is more effective when it is collaborative and culturally tailored,” says Miguel. “Specifically, honoring patients’ traditional health practices and preferences led to better asthma management, higher medication compliance, and fewer exacerbations.”
Miguel has also contributed to the development of federal policy that targets serious nationwide problems also faced by Hawaiʻi communities, including Hawaiʻi Island: nursing workforce shortages. She co-authored the 17th, 18th, and 19th reports to the U.S. Congress as a member of the National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice, targeting workforce and faculty shortages (see “Mitigating Nursing Workforce Challenges by Optimizing Learning Environments,” 2024 report).
Student incivility: “I’ve found that the best way to disrupt this choreography isn’t through purely punitive discipline, but by operationalizing the Aloha Spirit”
Miguel is also investigating student incivility born of a miscommunication cycle between students and faculty. She’s published a paper on it, “Transforming challenges into opportunities: Students’ incivility, the WHO nurse educator competencies, and perceptions of an ideal nurse” (Nurse Education Today, 2026).
“I took a deep dive into this because the systemic stakes are simply too high to ignore,” she says. “When incivility goes unchecked, it takes a massive emotional toll on educators. Faculty quit — which directly worsens the severe shortages we are already facing — and the resulting gaps in training can ultimately become downright dangerous to patient safety.”
Miguel includes her students in this line of inquiry, engaging them as active participants in studies on incivility and educator traits. What she’s found most fascinating is discovering that students don’t actually want complete leniency or a lack of structure. In fact, she found students deeply value ethical authority, fairness, and consistent professional boundaries.
“What we’re really witnessing is a profound ‘expectation-action gap,’” she says. “Students enter this field hungry for human connection and approachable mentors, but they often perceive faculty as distant, rigid, or punitive due to our own crushing workloads and the high-pressure environment of modern nursing programs. This disconnect sparks what I call the ‘dance of incivility,’ a reciprocal cycle of stress where a lack of transparent communication feels like dismissiveness to the student, leading to disengagement, which the faculty then interprets as personal disrespect.”
Interestingly, Miguel then returns to her island roots to make sense of, and find solutions for, these unfortunate perceptions.
“I’ve found that the best way to disrupt this choreography isn’t through purely punitive discipline, but by operationalizing the Aloha Spirit — compassion, mutual respect, and cultural humility — as a core professional competency,” she says.
The use of AI in teaching: “It is absolutely not here to replace the human heartbeat of nursing; it is here to enhance it”
In her investigations into the use of AI in teaching, Miguel finds that the same exact philosophy of human-centered adaptation she advocates for in a civil classroom also applies here.
“I see AI as the next logical step in our pedagogical evolution, much like when our profession first adopted healthcare informatics or high-fidelity simulation mannequins,” she explains. “It is absolutely not here to replace the human heartbeat of nursing; it is here to enhance it.”
In her research, she’s exploring how AI can serve as a supportive “scaffold” for clinical judgment.
“For instance, AI can help students quickly synthesize massive volumes of complex literature and pinpoint knowledge gaps,” says Miguel. “This effectively offloads the cognitive busywork, freeing up their mental energy for high-level analysis and actual, hands-on patient care. The key, of course, is strict human oversight. Just like simulation labs, AI creates a psychologically safe space to fail, pivot, and learn, beautifully preparing them for an increasingly digital healthcare landscape.”
Ultimately, she says, whether she’s managing a complex classroom dynamic or integrating a new AI tool, it all comes back to professional socialization.
“My overarching goal is to help students internalize the core values, ethics, and resilience they need to step out into the world as safe, compassionate nurses. That is how we intentionally transition our educational ecosystems away from a vicious cycle of hostility and toward a virtuous system of professional accountability.”
Read Associate Professor of Nursing Luz Miguel’s full research profile at Keaohou.
Story by Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
