Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
Comparing two pedagogic strategies
The largest shift in my approach to teaching happened when I changed from training future historians to teaching future medical practitioners the history of their profession. One of my first responsibilities was to arrange 2 two-week courses (3 ECTS), one on the history of psychiatry and another on history of infectious diseases. Both were held for the first time in January 2019. In order to learn more about what works for this new group of students, I chose two distinctly different pedagogical approaches.
For the first course, I chose Socratic reading groups: daily gatherings where we discussed reading handed out the previous day for about three hours. I also had two guest lecturers, and an excursion to a psychiatric hospital. The curriculum covered “madness”, from the Viking age till today, centering around biological, psychological and social interpretations and societal and medical responses. For the second course, I chose a practical approach: a two-day crash course, followed by two days where the students learned research tools at the medical library and skills for making a movie at Læringslaben. The prepared curriculum was limited. The students were divided into groups, offered supervision, and tasked with using the tools to create short movies presenting a historical aspect of a given infectious disease.
I arranged informal lunches during both courses and ended with a day where we saw a movie and had snacks. Both courses were assessed using reflection notes, a 4-8-page written assignment where the students were asked to present what they found most interesting and reflect on their learning outcomes. All students received written feedback on their essays.
The main finding of the comparison was that the first approach – discussing a predefined curriculum – gave a much better learning outcome. Learning a new field requires guidance. Having to learn a new set of skills distracted from learning history, which is what the students had signed up for. The report was shared as an email attachment to the students, the Dean of education at the medical faculty, Enhet for læring, as well as colleagues locally and at the University of Oslo, The Karolinska Institute, Aarhus University and Copenhagen University. The findings were also presented at a breakfast meeting at Læringslaben on February 14, 2019, where a student that had participated in both courses took part.
Students as partners
In the fall of 2019, I arranged a “feedback seminar” for medical students, asking for input on what elective courses they would like to see offered. This was part to get to know the students, part an attemt at preemting putting effort into courses the students would not be interested in taking.
The dean of education provided funding for pizza, and a colleague took part in organizing the discussion. This was not very successful: the seminar did not take place at a time of the year when students are concerned with elective courses, and the attendance was poor. A short report was shared with the Dean of education at the faculty, as well as Enhet for læring. I was, however, encouraged to repeat the event: the lessons learned about how to engage students are transferrable, and there is an interest in creating spaces for student engagement in course design.
In addition to the report, I made the experience the project for my UPED620-course. The presentation analyses the intervention in light of previous scholarship on “student as partners”. One outcome was recognizing the widespread use of students as paid assistants, including at the University of Bergen. After the restrictions lifted on access to the University Hospital, I secured funding for three assistants to catalogue the Faculty’s medical collections, which will be a valuable resource for teaching with objects.
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