Here we are again and another year of stimulating journal clubs to enjoy!
Our first for the year, back in early October, was delivered by Jan Deckers, SME. Jan presented McNair, RP (2005) The case for educating health care students in professionalism as the core content of interprofessional education. Medical Education 2005, 39, 456-464. To overcome barriers to effective relationships between professions in the workplace, we discussed that we may need more education that is interprofessional. We believed we could do more to incorporate interprofessional education in our Newcastle curriculums but that it can be difficult in engaging other disciplines, particularly from other institutions. We could identify some excellent examples of smaller incidences of interprofessional teaching across the faculty.
Richard Thomson, SME, hosted the November journal club. Humanism in the curriculum was the focus and the paper ‘Branch, WT, Frankel, RM, Hafler, JP, Weil, AB, Gilligan, MC, Litzelman, DK, Plews-Organ, M, Ridler, EA, Osterburg, LG, Dunne, D, May, NB and Derse, AR (2017) A Multi-Institutional Longitudinal Faculty Development Program in Humanism Supports the Professional Development of Faculty Teachers. Academic Medicine 92:12, 1681-1686.’ provided some beneficial outcomes into taking time to strengthen humanistic teaching and role modelling in medical schools not just for students but staff also. Richard has conducted some extensive research himself, even speaking with the author of the paper himself! The discussion was vast, from the evolving self (Kegan 1982) to mindfulness and our psychology audience members certainly did not disappoint in provoking our thoughts.
To get us talking about engaging our students (with a few minces pies to embrace the festive period), Ruth Valentine, SDS, presented ‘Ella R. Kahu & Karen Nelson (2018) Student engagement in the educational interface: understanding the mechanisms of student success, Higher Education Research & Development,37:1, 5871’. Ruth chose this paper, trying to answer a specific question regarding widening participation students – how do we help students from these under-represented groups do as well as other student populations? The paper presented centred on understanding the mechanisms of student success and focussed on students from under-represented groups studying at University. A lively discussion took place and although the group liked the idea of an educational interface, everyone felt that, in this paper, it was too broad and generic and that for these groups of student’s everyone is different and there is not one simple solution – and so we ended up with more questions than answers!
A big thank you to all our speakers of the first semester. As always, these sessions are extremely enjoyable and informative. To kick off Semester 2, Stephen McHanwell, SME, will be presenting on the 11th January. Title to follow.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Luisa Wakeling
All links to articles and up and coming speakers can be found at the Journal Club webpage.