Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship

Dr Jo Horsburgh, Principal Teaching Fellow in Medical Education

Last week colleagues from department of Primary Care and Public Health and I attended the Association of Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference in Vienna.

Attendees from across the world meet to share and discuss the latest innovations, thinking, and research in medical education. This year’s themes included Threshold Concepts and Activity theory with keynote talks from Professor Ray Land (University of Durham) and Prof Yrjö Engeström (University of Helsinki). In addition to a wide range of workshops and symposia, the conference also provided us with an excellent opportunity to meet with our collaborators from Australia, South Africa and the Netherlands to discuss shared projects.

I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to present some research from my doctoral studies on medical educator identity. This research explored the facilitators and barriers to professional identity development and prompted much discussion around how we can best support medical educators in their development.

There was a wide range of presentations from Imperial, including MEd in ULT alumnus, Dr Andy McKeown, who presented from his dissertation on educational authenticity in longitudinal integrated clerkships.

The conference was an excellent opportunity to share ideas and generate new projects in order to best develop medical education at Imperial.

Read Imperial’s contribution to international discussion about developing medical education in full

We – Jo Horsburgh, Martyn Kingsbury and Monika Pazio – have recently returned from a trip to Hiroshima, Japan, where we presented at the 6^th International Academic Identities Conference 2018 at Hiroshima University. The conference theme was ‘The Peaceful University: aspirations for academic futures – compassion, generosity, imagination and creation’ and offered us a forum for discussion of how academics’ relationships with students are changing and how those changes affect the role of the university within society from a variety of international perspectives.

Monika and Martyn along with Caroline Clewley from the Department of Physics presented on their research into staff- student partnerships with UROP students, in particular the use of visualisation to target abstract key concepts within Physics and other STEM subjects which students struggle to gain a deep conceptual understanding.

My presentation focussed on my doctoral research into the professional identity development of medical educators, in particular the similarities and differences between different groups of medics in how they develop their identities between different communities of practice.

As well as attending the conference in Hiroshima, on our trip to Japan we also made time to visit colleagues at the Institute for Excellence in Higher Education at Tohoku University in Sendai. During our visit we discussed active learning pedagogies and the work of Carl Wieman as well as common approaches to learning and teaching at our respective institutions. A return visit is being planned for later this year where our colleagues from Japan will meet with and learn from the learning and teaching community at Imperial College.

Dr Jo Horsburgh, Principal Teaching Fellow in Medical Education

Read 6th International Academic Identities Conference 2018, Hiroshima in full