It has been a great start to the year for the journal club. We have heard from our very own Steve McHanwell presenting Elwick, A & Cannizzaro, S (2017) Happiness in Higher Education. Higher Education Quarterly 71:2, 204–219.  This sparked much discussion on the definition of happiness in higher education and in life! We asked the questions “Are our students happy being in higher education and what do they get from it that would make them ‘happy’?”, “What can we do as an institution to support a student to be happy?” and “Can we even achieve this?”

Sue Thorpe gave us a good amount of thought provoking material to see us through November delivering Fox, C (2016) ‘I Find That Offensive’. Biteback Publishing Ltd, London prologue ix-xxii & part one 3-53. An account explaining the complexity of free speech and how many students, these days, are perhaps too easily offended to allow them to engage in proper debate.

Ellen Tullo then brought us into the world of Peer Teaching as seen by Ten Cate, O & Durning, S (2007). Dimensions and psychology of peer teaching in medical education. Medical Teacher 29(6):546-52. We discussed our own experiences of peer teaching within our courses and the possible benefits and disadvantages that could crop up. An interesting aspect of this is to consider advising students to review their learning material as if they were going to teach it!

Lastly, I would like to welcome School of Pharmacy to the group! It has been great having new input and a boost to the audience. We have our very first Pharmacy presenter after Christmas, Hamde Nazar and we will certainly look forward to discussing aspects of education from a Pharmacy perspective.

Seasons greetings,

Luisa Wakeling

All links to articles and up and coming speakers can be found at the Journal Club’s webpage https://internal.ncl.ac.uk/medical/teaching/events/journal.htm.