Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 10 | Page 10

10 | JADE
EDITORIAL | 11
SCOTT BORDER
Students were at the centre of experimental design, data collection,
analysis, manuscript production and dissemination—I took great
pleasure in sharing ownership of all of it. This taught me that for
those students who are intrinsically motivated this was their perfect
reward, since it had the potential to support and develop their careers
from an early stage. From this point, my students and I have been
invited speakers at national conferences and have delivered national
workshops on delivering sustainable NPT programmes (Border et al,
2017). Since then, student involvement in the module has expanded
to include curriculum design, formative assessment strategies and
feedback (Myers et al, 2018a). The students had evolved within
the partnership to become the proactive decision makers which
was described as the “gold standard” example of inclusivity at the
beginning of this editorial—and not only that, the students were
mentoring the next generations of peer teachers who were inspired
and in awe of their achievements.
After successfully achieving a significant improvement in the
module evaluation over successive years since the launch of the
NPT programme, there was a drive to reach out beyond our own
institution, to inspire and motivate the next generation of neurologists
and neurosurgeons. Seeing as places for these specialities is highly
competitive we decided to launch a national competition that
would allow enthusiasts to demonstrate their commitment to the
field. The National Undergraduate Neuroanatomy Competition
(NUNC) was launched in 2013 with medical students involved in all
aspects of the event management. Since then we have welcomed
over 500 students representing 38/39 UK medical schools through
our laboratory doors to be tested on our intricate human brain
dissections, and to hear talks from world leading experts. The scope
of the assessment goes beyond that of the standard curriculum
and has brought back aspects of detail that had been lost through
previous curriculum reform changes, which has been highly praised
by senior clinicians. In that respect it has been lauded for raising
the standards of clinical neuroscience education and for vertically
integrating the subject within the discipline. The data on student
performance and longitudinal impact on careers has since been
published (Hall et al, 2014b; Myers et al, 2018b) and can now serve to
inform future educational practice.
I never imagined that the spirit of engagement amongst the
partnership would prosper and thrive in this way; the dynamics of
the team were in perfect balance to provide optimum conditions
for creative thinking and innovation. I attribute this to the relaxed
and informal working relationship and the mutual respect that we
all shared. Much of it was achieved through daily working in shared
space, generating a hive of activity that gradually blurred the lines of
hierarchy. It is important to remember that the scholarly community
EDITORIAL: INCLUSIVE TEACHING
of any of higher education Institution consists of both the staff and its
students—learning is never unidirectional, and working with students
in this way can help to remind us all of that. Inclusivity in this context
is indicated in the broadest sense to represent not just interactions
through teaching and scholarship but also more tangibly such as
through loosening restrictions and policy when it comes to sharing
physical space and faculty resources.
Our next step was to take the NPT model online to create quality
bite sized resources that could be shared around the world to help
make learning neuroscience simple. Soton Brain Hub (SBH) is a
successful online clinical neuroscience themed You Tube channel
created by a team of doctors, anatomists and medical students
at the University of Southampton. With over 100 SBH screencasts
and videos to choose from they are being accessed for learning in
over 100 countries, every second of every day. Hosting educational
resources online provides great benefits in terms of reach because
the resources are easily accessible to anyone, anywhere at any time
(Patel, et al, 2016). Furthermore, the academic community may also
find value in integrating videos when adopting blended learning,
flipped classroom approaches or compiling eBooks (Elmansouri et
al, 2018). When incorporated into our medical curriculum students
have found supplementation of existing teaching with SBH resources
significantly more popular than anatomy practical sessions alone
(Lowry et al, 2016). The SBH philosophy is to ensure engagement
through concise, interesting and unique content which facilitates
learning through cultivating an environment of recreational
education (Pilborough et al, 2015).
The growth of the partnership philosophy has transformed my
teaching and enabled Southampton to shine as a centre of excellence
for clinical neuroscience teaching. I share every inch of that success
with the students and they own as much of it as I do. I look forward
to hearing stories and examples of true staff student partnerships
in this themed issue of the journal, as a way of building further
evidence to demonstrate that inclusive working in this way provides
genuine ‘added value’ to the student experience and enriches the
curriculum. In particular I praise such projects which have embedded
robust pedagogic research alongside innovation to provide evidence
for sustained practice, so it becomes possible to mount a serious
challenge to the historical way in which we think about and develop
staff/student relationships in the future.
References
Border, S. (2017). Working with students as partners in anatomy education.
Anatomical sciences education, 10(6), 613-614.