COLLEGE NEWS SHAPING THE FUTURE OF CHIROPRACTIC
We caught up with Access Programme Leader Phil Dewhurst who told us about his work within education. Phil strives to help our students get the best learning experience possible, and as part of our dedicated faculty he contributes greatly towards achieving AECC’s strategic aims.
What is your role at the AECC?
I graduated from the AECC in 2005 and then worked in private practice for three years. I always had in my mind that I might come back and get involved in teaching, so when there was a vacancy at the college, I decided to give it a go, and a few weeks later I was offered the position.
Back in 2012 the AECC started an Access to Higher Education Diploma which is a one year course that allows students to go on to study for a range of health related degrees. I started teaching anatomy on that course, and in 2014 I have taken over as programme leader, so I’m responsible for the management of the course and the faculty that are involved in teaching on it.
What are your professional interests?
I started out at the AECC in 2008 as a support tutor and got involved with as much as I could around the institution. In 2009 I enrolled onto a Master’s programme (MSc in Clinical Sciences) at the college. I was starting to become more involved with anatomy teaching and decided to base my MSc on the students perception of anatomy tuition in the undergraduate programme. The MSc was good because it was structured so that I could tailor it to suit my role, and rather than looking at a clinical aspect of patient care, I focussed on the educational aspect.
Having looked at education and the educational process, I then became interested in actually learning more about education itself, how students learn and how to be an effective teacher. Teaching in higher education, particularly in a professional vocational/clinical subject, is not like school teaching – there’s a lot more emphasis
on the student to learn than there is on the teacher to teach. In terms of my own style, I used to teach in the same way I was taught, lots of lectures and content. My Masters caused me to question this method and whether there was a better, more effective way of teaching. This led me to enrol on the Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education at the University of Dundee. I’ve become particularly interested in ways of encouraging student learning, addressing issues such as: ‘is the focus on the teacher or the learner’ and ‘what are the different learning strategies as opposed to the different teaching strategies’. I’ve also looked at different types of assessment and how you can tailor them to a particular method of teaching or learning as well as which assessments work well with which content.
I’m currently looking at e-learning which is probably the biggest change we’ve seen in higher education in the last five to ten years. The idea behind this is the flipped classroom, so rather than traditional lectures, lectures become interactive online tutorials. This means that students can do their traditional lecture-based learning through the Virtual Learning Environment beforehand, so that when you see them, you have a far more focussed tutorial group. I believe that this method of learning empowers the student. There is far more emphasis on the independent learner which I think is good in higher education.
What was your highlight from last year?
Because I am undertaking the Postgraduate Certificate at Dundee I was asked to become part of the curriculum development group for our new MChiro course. We have completed all of the curriculum design and are now working towards validation with Bournemouth University and accreditation with the GCC. Once this is complete I will be part of the group that sees it all the way through to implementation. The final stage will be evaluation to see if all of those new concepts that we designed actually did what we thought they were going to do, and whether the students got the benefit from them that we hoped they would.
What does it mean to teach?
While I love being in clinical practice and seeing patients, I take pride in my work in education and hope that it can help to shape the future of the profession. I hope to help students thrive out there in the healthcare sector, to make their education as rounded as it can be and to ensure that they are good ambassadors for the profession. If they are technically well skilled and know their stuff academically, then they can make a difference for all the right reasons.
11 Above: Phil Dewhurst
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