van Schalkwyk Susan, Blitz Julia
Centre for Health Professions Education, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa.
Med Educ. 2024 Mar;58(3):299-307. doi: 10.1111/medu.15216. Epub 2023 Sep 12.
Globally, faculty development initiatives in support of health professions (HP) educators continue to extend their remit. This work becomes more critical as HP curriculum renewal activities are influenced by needing to move beyond a biomedical focus attending to issues such as social accountability, social justice and health equity. This raises questions about how best to support our HP educators who may need to change their teaching practice as they embrace these more complex, social constructs.
The research question for this qualitative study was: What implications are there for faculty development that can support HP educators as they are expected to incorporate the principles of critical consciousness and social accountability into their teaching as part of a curriculum renewal process? Data from 11 focus group discussions and 11 subsequent individual interviews with HP educators from two undergraduate programmes were thematically analysed after which further analysis focussed on the implications of these findings for faculty development. Transformative learning theory and models about change provided a sensitising framework.
Our findings pointed to an expanded role for HP educators and consequently also for those responsible for faculty development. Three main ideas were highlighted: Curriculum renewal catalyses a renewed need for faculty development, the nature of faculty development that can enable change and new foci for faculty development.
Faculty development can make a significant contribution to enabling change, including in the context of curriculum renewal that often extends the roles and responsibilities of HP educators. When renewal seeks to shift fundamental curriculum principles, providing support to embrace this expanded remit results in an equally expanded remit for faculty developers-one that calls for initiatives that enable critical, dialogic encounters that might foster critical consciousness, leading to change in HP education. This challenges us, as faculty developers, to turn the mirror on ourselves to consider the nature of such expanded support.
在全球范围内，支持卫生专业教育工作者的师资发展举措不断扩大其范围。随着卫生专业课程更新活动受到影响，需要超越生物医学重点，关注社会问责、社会正义和健康公平等问题，这项工作变得更加关键。这就引发了一个问题，即如何最好地支持我们的卫生专业教育工作者，他们在接受这些更复杂的社会建构时可能需要改变自己的教学实践。
这项定性研究的研究问题是：在课程更新过程中，期望卫生专业教育工作者将批判性意识和社会问责原则纳入教学时，师资发展会有哪些影响，以支持他们？对来自两个本科项目的卫生专业教育工作者进行了11次焦点小组讨论和11次后续个人访谈的数据进行了主题分析，之后进一步分析集中在这些发现对师资发展的影响上。变革性学习理论和变革模型提供了一个敏感框架。
我们的研究结果指出了卫生专业教育工作者以及负责师资发展的人员的角色扩大。突出了三个主要观点：课程更新催生了对师资发展的新需求、能够促成变革的师资发展的性质以及师资发展的新重点。
师资发展可以为促成变革做出重大贡献，包括在课程更新的背景下，课程更新往往会扩大卫生专业教育工作者的角色和职责。当更新旨在转变基本课程原则时，为接受这一扩大的职责提供支持会导致师资发展人员的职责同样扩大——这需要能够促成批判性对话交流的举措，可能会培养批判性意识，从而导致卫生专业教育的变革。这向我们这些师资发展人员提出了挑战，要审视自身，思考这种扩大支持的性质。
