My role is to work with students and staff within the Faculty of Medical Sciences to support new and existing curricular and co-curricular interventions that enhance students’ enterprise skills and entrepreneurial learning.

The words ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ have a plethora of connotations. Without a contextual basis this can be very off-putting. I am keen to establish what we mean by ‘enterprise’, and in particular, why it is important to medical sciences.

Our support works along an enterprise spectrum; enterprise skills (e.g. soft skills), leading to entrepreneurial learning (commercial and business awareness within the context of the curriculum) and entrepreneurship (starting an actual business) – all of which can be applied to learning contexts. Enterprise skills development activities include the prospective Enterprise Skills for Psychologist session under development for 2016 stage 1 psychology students. Examples of interventions related to entrepreneurial learning include the Dental Enterprise Workshops for 4th year dentistry students, looking at the underpinnings of running a practice, and supporting the Business for the Bioscientist module within biomedical sciences. Entrepreneurship takes the form of working with students and graduates interested in starting a business, such as Stuart Maitland, co-founder of the medical education platform, Mediwikis, and recent winner of the prestigious Santander Universities Enterprise Awards and £20,000 cash prize.

For the life sciences, innovation and problem-solving are imperative. Students, researchers and practitioners come across unique everyday problems – and are in fact the best placed to solve them. However, they often don’t perceive themselves as ‘problem-solvers’ or ‘enterprising’, and our interest lies in developing opportunities for students to re-think their role as solvers and innovators within the context of their learning. The QAA report (2012) on enterprise and entrepreneurship education within HE highlights the capacity for enterprise to simultaneously enhance contextual learning and provide transdisciplinary knowledge and skills, applicable for a jobs market that is increasingly demanding ‘portfolio careers’ and wider knowledge of business demands. This is especially apparent in the health services, where more often, successful delivery is based on a premise of innovative practices, adaptability and cost-effectiveness. My role is to ultimately create and increase opportunities where students can develop the preparedness they require to navigate meaningful careers in a changing world.

I am organising a lunch for academics who are interested in developing areas of the curriculum where enterprise/entrepreneurial learning would enhance students’ educational experience, and would welcome opportunity to discuss this further.

Alecia Dunn, Entrepreneurial Development Officer, Entrepreneurial Development Unit (EDU), Careers Service

Congratulations to Dr Clare Guilding, School of Medical Education, who has been co-opted onto the Education and Training Committee for the British Pharmacological Society.

There have been some short one hour sessions arranged to give an overview of the whole ethics process that the University is responsible for.  Professor Daniel Nettle and Dr Judith Bulmer will be delivering the sessions on October 6th 9-10am and November 25th 4-5pm.

Please contact Kimberley Sutherland kimberley.sutherland@ncl.ac.uk  to sign up to a session.

The last three months will have passed in a blur of exams and marking, with more to come! Hopefully our programme of events, including the Journal Club and L&T seminars, will have provided added stimulation and created some food for thought for you.

We have been continuing to forge links with key units in the wider University that will benefit L&T staff in the Faculty as a whole. In May we held a joint event with ECLS, CfLaT and the T&L in HE Research Group. This was a ‘Pecha Kucha’ Research Sharing Event and it was very well attended by Faculty staff. I have met with staff in the Learning and Teaching Development Service, looking at ways we can work together to support staff here in the Faculty. They have a wealth of experience and contacts we can tap into in terms of guest speakers and training opportunities. The ECLS research tea for students completing the ‘Thinking Critically about Research Methodology’ (EDU8207) has prompted two new initiatives. Firstly, with the support of Anna Reid, module leader, we are exploring the opportunity for FMS staff acting as co-supervisors on future student projects. Secondly, we will be promoting to Heads of Schools the opportunity for their T&L staff to sign up to do EDU8207 as a stand-alone module that will enhance their portfolio of skills. If you are interested in either of these do get in touch with me.

We have also been digesting and acting on ideas from our Launch event.  We now have a blog! https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/erdp/. This is open to the world so please do circulate the link to contacts outside of the University. The blog will include all of our newsletter articles so it should be a good way to start spreading the good work we’re doing here in Newcastle. We’re pulling together seminars for the autumn which will include one covering the ever tricky topic of ‘ethics’ and one that will be presented by Dr Hamish Macleod from Edinburgh University, both ideas prompted by the Launch event.

I’m very pleased to announce that the Faculty will be funding staff through a new round of EQUATE. EQUATE sets out to share research and knowledge about T&L and apply that research and knowledge to a range of action research projects. The plan is that this round will include a ‘writing day’ with the intention that staff will not only get accreditation within existing frameworks at Master’s and Doctoral level, they will produce a publishable paper.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter.  There’s a lot of innovative project work and good news to read about.  If you have articles for the next issue due in September just send them through to  fms.educational.research@newcastle.ac.uk.

Professor Steve McHanwell, Director FMS Unit for ERDP

The annual TEA awards are about celebrating teaching excellence and we’re proud to report that three awards went to teaching staff in FMS.

Outstanding Contribution to Feedback: Chris Baldwin

Overall Teaching Excellence Award: Clare Guilding

Innovative Teaching FMS: Iain Keenan

Thank you to everyone who got involved in the ERDP Launch Event in March. The event was very productive with 46 L&T staff, representing all four Teaching Schools and a few of the Institutes, participating in interactive activities to stimulate conversation and generate ideas for ERDP.

We were joined by Professor Simon Lancaster, a National Teaching Fellow from the University of East Anglia, who led a session that challenged us all to get to grips with Twitter (follow the thread for the event: https://storify.com/S_J_Lancaster/faculty-of-medical-sciences-newcastle) and the concept of the flipped classroom. Lively discussion moved from the pros and cons of lecture capture to the concept that students generating their own vignettes results in improved constructive peer critique to the revelation that there is evidence that student module evaluations are systematically biased against women!

There were lots of ideas generated in the World Café session that will help us shape the ERDP into something that L&T staff want. You want information and support. To this end, over the next few months we’ll be looking to:

• collect baseline data about our constituency and what educational research is happening in the Faculty and sharing it with you
• expand the number of resources on our internal website
• establish a social media strategy
• promote networking and collaboration opportunities
• raise awareness of the University promotion process
• promote training opportunities

Tackling a wish list that includes adding extra hours to the day is a tall order but the ERDP is well placed to raise the issue of L&T staff having dedicated research time with University management and sees this as a long term strategic aim.

The notes from the event can be found on our internal webpage. Keep an eye out for our mailing list messages to see what new initiatives we’ll be putting in place.

We hope you gained something from the event and made some new contacts.

Organising team: Vanessa Armstrong, Sarah Harvey, Susanne Lewis, Steve McHanwell, Helen St Clair Thompson, Luisa Wakeling.

The School of Dental Sciences delivers two undergraduate and four post-graduate programmes. All our programmes have a strong vocational focus and the Bachelor of Dental Sciences, and the Diploma in Dental Hygiene & Therapy ( shortly to become the new BSc in Oral & Dental Health sciences) are both accredited by the General Dental Council.

 The transformation of a diverse group of young learners into technically able, reflective and professional dentists, and dental hygienists/therapists is not a particularly easy proposition. Many of the issues are common to medicine, particularly the application of science to a clinical scenario, developing effective communication and the attributes of being a health care professional. There are also unique challenges such as developing technical skill to a level so that our charges can safely perform extremely demanding technical dentistry in the confined space of the human mouth. They have to start doing this by the beginning of their second (BSc) or third (BDS) year. They also have to do this whilst also dealing with the apprehension that most dental patients seem to share.

Action research to help us understand and develop our practice in this context where patient safety is paramount has, understandably, been an academic focus in the School of Dental Sciences for some years. The range of work is as diverse as the students we teach.

The student journey with a focus on the key transitions that are required throughout the undergraduate courses has provided us with a number of interesting research themes.

• Collaborative research with other Dental Schools has allowed us to compare the ability of different student selection techniques to predict future performance.
• The development of competence in essential techniques through simulated but authentic skill development progressing to real life dentistry and competence assessment is another time of essential transition.
• Our work with technology development and the use of electronic portfolio to enhance student’s ability to record and reflect in order to become life-long, independent learners is perhaps one of the largest areas for our research in recent years.

Our action research also engages with the local community (through outreach activities, community health education projects and patient involvement), as well as collaboration with other UK and European schools. Curriculum enhancements and innovations in sign-posting the acquisition of broad professional skills is an area of growing interest and one in which a number of successful innovations are now being published, as is enhancing feedback through self, peer, teacher and patient engagement.

Student support and the management of arising issues has led us to develop peer mentoring and to report on the increasing challenges of managing the ‘student in difficulty’.

An ongoing PhD study involving in-depth literature review and document analysis is currently allowing a full exploration of the concept of professionalism. We perceive that this may well be a starting point for a further broad reaching programme of research culminating in the development of a robust assessment of professionalism which could have an impact across multiple spheres.

The commonalities with aspects of all of the courses run in the faculty are easy to see and we look forward to working with other disciplines and making a full contribution to the new Unit.

Jimmy Steele and Janice Ellis, School of Dental Sciences