Keep growing
your teaching @ SU
Teaching
Fellowships The SU Teaching Fellowships provide excellent teachers and
scholars of teaching and learning with the opportunity to spend more consistent
periods of time, with various forms of support, to focus on aspects of
curriculum renewal, the exploration of teaching and learning, and the
dissemination of good teaching and learning practice in departments and
faculties. More information about the 2021 Teaching Fellowships is available
from Dr Karin Cattell-Holden, kcattell@sun.ac.za or on the CTL Website.
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The body of work
developed by Dr Elize Archer of the CHPE resulting from her Teaching Fellowship
(2017-2019) continues to grow. She has recently been awarded with an
Early Career Development grant (June 2020 - June 2021) based on her research
about empathy in health professions and how it can be taught and learned. The
impact of this body of work has been to empower several colleagues (and
herself) to include the teaching of empathy in current curricula and to
increase awareness about patient-centredness in the health system.
Elize has found
in her research and teaching, that health professionals can be taught
behavioural skills, but will probably not make sustained changes towards
patient-centred health care until it resonates with their own world view. Up to now most of her work was done with
undergraduate students. She realised that, in order to influence students’
behaviour and thinking, it is important to understand the perspectives of the
registrars (specialists in training), since they have a huge influence on the
junior students' development. It is important to understand how they manage (in
the very busy and complex health system) to navigate their patient interactions
in terms of empathic communication. Her follow-up work will be investigating exactly
this.
“The affordances
that CTL provides have been instrumental in my development as an academic. As a
new lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, I received FIRLT
funds in 2008 for a project called The use of simulated patient scenarios
in the teaching of basic clinical procedural skills. This helped me to
start exploring the communication skills of medical students. Since then a lot
has happened - but there is no doubt in my mind that this opportunity has
helped me to get started!”
Dr
Archer received an SU Teaching Excellence Award in the “Developing Teacher”
category in 2018. She also received a merit certificate for her Teaching
Fellowship in 2019, acknowledging her contribution to the development of the
scholarship of teaching and learning at SU.
