You are invited to attend the next lunch time Auxin session offered by the Centre for Teaching and Learning.
Speaker: Dr Anthea
Hansen
Topic: Socially responsive curricula in medical education: A student perspective
Date: 01 October 2024
Time: 13:00-14:00
Venue: MS Teams: Join the meeting now
Summary of the Auxin:
There is an urgency for health professionals to be better prepared to tackle health inequities. The literature argues that transitioning to responsive and contextually relevant curricula is an important strategy to equip students to be both clinically competent and critically conscious of the contexts in which they provide healthcare. However, little is known about how students understand social responsiveness and the implications for their involvement in reframing health professions curricula to be more responsive.
This presentation will focus on a qualitative study that explored the experiences of undergraduate final-year medical students regarding social responsiveness.
Drawing on socially just pedagogies to offer insights into the student perspectives, the students expressed that the curriculum provided opportunities to engage with concepts related to social justice and equity. However, these opportunities were less frequent and were considered less valued when compared to biomedical knowledge. Furthermore, the cultures and traditions of medicine create conditions that position students as consumers of the curriculum. Nevertheless, students expressed a desire to be co-creators in the process of the transformation of the curriculum.
As health professions education shifts towards advancing social justice, it is essential that the curricula grant students access to the type of knowledge and skills that will empower them to tackle injustice and become responsive to health inequities. This necessitates reframing what constitutes as powerful knowledge in medical education to include social justice. Additionally, students should be considered co-constructors of their learning and key role players in transforming curricula to be socially responsive and contextually relevant.
Biography of the speaker:
Anthea Hansen is a lecturer in the Department of Health Professions Education. She holds a PhD in Health Professions Education from Stellenbosch University, a MPhil in Disability Studies and BSc Audiology from the University of Cape Town. Her interests are in the areas of social justice through education, socially just pedagogies, transformative learning, decoloniality, interprofessional education and collaborative practice, child health and disability studies. Her PhD research topic focused on the undergraduate medical students' experiences of social responsiveness in the curriculum.
For more information contact Mr Simbongile Ntwasa at sim@sun.ac.za