Course design and plans
Being responsible for giving the students at the Faculty of Medicine an overview of the history of the profession and field they are about to enter means most of my teaching takes the form of one-off lectures within larger courses where my role is to provide a historical background to current practices. The national learning outcomes are comprehensive, and it can be frustrating having to spend limited time on explaining the relevance of history.
I have started the process of reworking the lectures to create a more logical progression throughout the medical study. Starting in the first semester, my lectures and walking tour provide a historical introduction to the town and hospital area, the persons commemorated by giving their names to the buildings, tools to navigate campus, and identity-building anecdotes the students can share with friends and family members. The idea is to use these as a building block when the students later learn more about the health system, health burdens, the development of medical thinking and practices, and its impact on society.
In addition, I will continue to teach elective courses for those who want deeper insights into parts of the medical history. These courses give me more freedom in deciding learning outcomes, aligned assessment, and course design. Moving forward, I hope to offer one elective course every second year, preferably in the intersection between student interests and my own research. Before the pandemic, I started planning a course on science communication, with the aim of training students as “knowledge hosts”, in collaboration with the University Museum, Haukeland University Hospital and other communicators. Based on student feedback from the previous courses, this will center around discussing a predefined curriculum, and visits to different practitioners. The process of arranging visits to museums, the communications division at the hospital, etc., has had to be put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the course will not be arranged until 2022. For assessment, I am divided between continued use of reflection notes, or a more practical assignment where the students are to demonstrate science communication in practice.
The “knowledge-hosts” will be organized as part of the Documentation center on medical research I am working to establish. The center will document and communicate the results of past and present medical research. The pandemic complicated negotiations with the faculty, the university director’s office, Haukeland hospital, and other collaborators, but in summer 2020 I received funding to hire assistants to clean, organize and catalogue an extensive collection of medical items. This will be a vital resource for shaping the learning environment and bringing the medical collections into a more active use.
Finally, I am a member of the oversight board for the 6th semester of medical school (semesterstyret MED6), where I am responsible for the teaching in social medicine. This entails coordinating internal and external lecturers, curriculum and activities. I hope to use the pandemic to introduce more active learning (student discussion in groups with digital resources prior to a “live” discussion on zoom). I also represent my department, IGS, in the steering committee for the PhD program (programutvalg for forskerutdanningen).
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