Bridging the Gap: A Program to Enhance Medical Students\u27 Learning Experience in the Foundation Year

Objective: To evaluate students’ perceptions of the intervention program based on small group teaching, regular continuous assessment, science-based tailored study skills program and recorded attendance on students’ enhanced learning experience in the first year of study in an outcome-based medical course. Design: Descriptive study. Setting: RCSI Bahrain. Method: A Twenty-seven-item questionnaire was administered to foundation year students at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland – Medical University of Bahrain (RCSI Bahrain) after the completion of the first semester to explore whether these interventions enriched the students’ learning experience or not. Comparisons of pass rates in all modules over the four years were also included. Students’ perceptions of the academic study skills course were collected through a questionnaire activity (version 2007120102) via the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Result: The results suggest that local adaptations of undergraduate programs may lead to pedagogical expertise that contribute to enhanced learning experience of students and better integration of pre-university and third-level courses. The majority of questionnaire items were rated positively and the comparison of pass rates showed the highest results in the year the intervention was implemented. Conclusion: Making local adaptations to medical programs without changing the core curriculum can mark good academic practice. Considering specific socio-cultural frameworks of students may lead to improvements in the delivery of programs in universities

The stories we tell: uncanny encounters in Mr Straw’s house

During my first visit to Mr Straw’s House, a National Trust Property in the North of England, I was intrigued by the discrepancies between the narrative framework provided by the National Trust – its exclusions, silences and invisibilities – and the far more complex stories the house seemed to tantalisingly hint at. As a scholar I am drawn to certain sites and affectively engage with them and yet I usually keep silent about my investment which informs not only my interest but also how I read these heritage sites. My aim here is not primarily to interrogate my own investment, but to ask how productive it is, what it enables me to see and to describe and where its limits are. This case study explores a particular tourist attraction from the perspective of storytelling and asks what narratives can be constructed around, and generated through, the spatial-emotional dimensions of this heritage site. I am interested in the hold sites have over people, why and how they provoke imaginative and empathic investment that generates a network of stories and triggers processes of unravelling which have the potential to transform silences and unmetabolised affect into empathy and emotional thought

Museums in Britain and the First World War

As an historian, genealogy has always worried me. I hold the Bible and the legal profession equally responsible for what is, after all an obsession. Those who engage in genealogy usually have something to prove. They search for an unbroken lineage to someone worth being related to and, better still, important. Deviations along the way, such as illegitimacy, can be tolerated as long as they are sufficiently far in the past to be safe to mention. My problem with all this is that genealogy leaves out so much and asks so few questions. Real lives are about so much more than a series of 'begats' and 'begottens '. They are about choices made and not made, political change, feelings and circumstances.

Museums and the Lightness of Life

The concept of ‘dream space’, a term coined by Sheldon Annis in 1989, introduced the museums community to the idea that a significant element in experiencing museums is concerned with the unconscious mind. Whereas hitherto research has been directed at the cognitive and outwardly cultural, Annis’s term ‘dream space’ has prompted examination of the affective and inwardly sentient (Kavanagh 2000). To understand more of the dream space, as a phenomenon of the way museums are envisaged and engaged with, is to ask questions about our subjective selves, individually and collectively, from psychological and other viewpoints. It follows that the concept of dream space begs questions about memory, emotional make-up, psychological states, life stage, life experience, cultural norms, ethnicity and gender. And it also raises questions about core beliefs and our relationship with what might be termed a spiritual dimension, however tenuous that might be for many.