Ninth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

The technological advancement in different fields of medical knowledge expands exponentially in time, resulting in unprecedented complexity for Western medicine. This stresses medical education below the threshold that ensures safe medical practice. In this situation, the professors’ comprehension of science teaching should move beyond the positivist paradigm that rules university education in Chile and other countries. From a purposive theoretical sampling oriented to maximizing the potential variation, a group of nineteen Human Anatomy scholars from eleven medical schools within and outside the country were selected. Based on their experiences of teaching human anatomy, the analyzed data illustrates the different ways scholars understand teaching, learning, and assessment. The discourse is fragmented in units of meaning, which are analyzed according to the phenomenographical approach and organized by differences and commonalities, on the basis of epistemological attributes. The outcomes of this research are different content-related categories describing the different ways human anatomy scholar’s experience and conceive the teaching-learning-assessment phenomena. Two features of the concepts described are critical for teacher professional development based on a deeper, more thoughtful collective understanding of teaching, learning and assessment. The first is the way in which scholars understand the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing. The second critical feature is the relationship between the dimensions of teaching, learning, and assessment, as an integral part of single phenomena. Based on these findings, a variety of streams of teacher development are proposed towards expanding awareness on strategic alertness to ‘teachable moments’ as they occur in the classroom.