Policy and professionalism in pharmacy education

Pharmacy as a profession in the United Kingdom (UK) is on a path of significant change with legislative and policy changes to practice happening or on the horizon. The UK government review of the regulation of health professionals will have a major impact on the profession of pharmacy and thus on the education of pharmacists. For many pharmacy academics there is also an interesting dual professional identify; academics have an occupational identity from being a teacher but their identity as a subject specialist comes from their professional background. This essay will explore the impact of policy and professionalism on these dual identities in the context of pharmacy higher education

Opening the door on student learning: using artefacts to explore pharmacy students’ learning practices

Pharmacy as a profession is on a path of significant change with many external and internal influences on the nature and conceptions of professional practice and the diverse and changing nature of this knowledge in turn creates a challenge for pharmacy educators. Conceptual changes to pharmacy knowledge and practice have profound pedagogical implications for how pharmacy education will change over the next few years. This study makes an original contribution to knowledge in pharmacy education, both in terms of the methodology used (the use of artefacts to explore learning with pharmacy students and the use of theory from anthropology, fine art and literature from English medieval poetry to view the data) and also in terms of the findings. The key findings of the study are that artefacts afford access to insight into pharmacy students’ learning, and use of these identified a number of learning and assessment practices, particularly some normally un-noticed practices. Using fine art to view participants’ assessment practices has allowed insight into their conceptions of assessment (as the summative written examination) and hence their views on feedback. In particular there was a strong affective dimension expressed in participants’ accounts of their learning, which is often ignored in teaching, learning and assessment practices. Participants’ learning is constructed through a ‘meshwork’ of interconnected and interwoven practices. The difficulties experienced by participants were explored and were found to be primarily modal (relating to a particular way of thinking or practising) or ontological (relating to ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ as a pharmacy student or to their professional identity). Recommendations for MPharm curriculum development at Robert Gordon University are discussed along with the implications for the wider professional community. (Please note this is a redacted version of the thesis. Some images have been removed for copyright reasons.

P-06 An Examination of Resilience Over Time Between Men and Women in Psychological First Aid

Research has shown that Psychological First Aid (PFA) helps to promote resilience in individuals affected by traumatic events (Everly, 2012). The purpose of this study is to examine differences in resilience levels between gender over time by comparing PFA with a Social Acknowledgment condition. The Response to Stressful Events Scale is used to assess resilience (Johnson et al. 2011). Using a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA, it is hypothesized that there will be a significant interaction between time and gender. Women will exhibit increasing resilience levels over time, however, men will exhibit no change

Using artefacts and qualitative methodology to explore pharmacy students’ learning practices

Objective: To investigate how pharmacy students negotiate the pedagogical demands of a revised pharmacy curriculum and to understand students’ learning practices and to explore the impact of assessment and feedback regimes in one School of Pharmacy. Methods: Using qualitative methodology and artefacts to explore pharmacy students’ learning in order to understand their learning practices in negotiating a field of inquiry as well as identifying difficulties encountered along the way. Data collection took the form of individual semi-structured interviews with undergraduate pharmacy students. Participants were asked to select three artefacts (a photograph, an object, a song, a picture or something else) that represented what learning as a pharmacy student meant to them and bring that along to an interview. Data were analyzed thematically using mind-mapping and subsequently, Law’s25,26 concepts of practices and collateral realities and Ingold’s12,12 concept of dwelling were used to make sense of the analysis. Results: Findings were grouped into five distinct themes: study practices or strategies adopted, rituals associated with learning and studying, pharmacy knowledge, motivation for learning and ways of learning. In the following section, each of these identified thematics is summarized, with illustrations from the data given. The affective dimensions of learning was a strong emergent theme throughout the data. Conclusions: The use of artefacts in the research process afforded in-depth insight into the specific study practices adopted by a group of pharmacy students. Findings from this study suggest that qualitative methods can be useful in surfacing students’ practice as regards strategies deployed, and difficulties faced in their negotiation of new pharmacy curricula

An Examination of Resilience over Time Between Men and Women in Psychological First Aid

Research has shown that Psychological First Aid (PFA) crisis intervention helps to promote resilience in individuals affected by traumatic events (Everly, 2012). This study examined differences in resilience levels between genders over time by comparing PFA with a Social Acknowledgment (control) condition. Using the Response to Stressful Events Scale (Johnson et al., 2011) to measure resilience, subject responses (N=41) were analyzed using a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA. Results indicated that there were no statistically significant main effects or interactions. These findings do not support the study\u27s hypotheses that there would be a significant interaction between time and gender

Who's that talking in my class?: What does research say about pupil to pupil exploratory talk that leads to learning?

This paper explores the literature to determine if exploratory talk could aid pupil learning and understanding in secondary schools and, if so, how it could best be utilised and what the roles of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘learner’ are in the process. We found five main themes related to talk and learning: exploratory talk is educationally valuable but not easy to implement; ‘initiation-response-feedback’; is much more commonly used; there are other types of talk which are generally less good for developing thinking; exploratory talk is good for collaborative learning; and exploratory talk is best organised with a set of ‘ground rules’. It became apparent to us that agreeing and setting the ground rules was a very important factor in generating successful pupil to pupil talk for learning and that there is a strong relationship between adherence to ground rules for talking together and improving children’s ability to solve problems. For consistency of a whole-school approach, we found that these group-specific ground rules should be set within an overall framework developed through teachers developing ways to work collaboratively with colleagues to investigate ways of promoting exploratory talk with all classes. Finally we highlight to school leaders the importance of developing and supporting a whole school approach to exploratory talk