Penny Hansen
Co-chair of the IUPS Education Committee, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada.

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.92.20

18-21 July 2013
University of Bristol, UK

Although English was the language of this 8th Teaching Workshop associated with an IUPS Congress, I could hear many other languages, such as Arabic, Spanish, Chinese and Swahili, being spoken as colleagues from 28 different countries chatted and discussed physiology with new and old friends during poster sessions and refreshment breaks. This cultural diversity was enhanced during the farewell party on the last evening of the workshop when we all wore clothing to reflect our countries or ethnic backgrounds – everything from Japanese yukata kimonos to African dashikis and Indian saris to my plain old Canadian red and white maple-leafed T-shirt.

The Congress was hosted by the modern University of Bristol set amidst the beautiful old buildings of this 16th century city. The local organizing team, headed by Judy Harris, had thoughtfully attended to every detail and answered every emailed question so that all arrangements for us went smoothly and efficiently. One hundred and nine physiologists arrived by airplane, bus and train from six continents for four days of intense discussion and work. Looking around I saw approximately equal numbers of men and women of all ages, well-distributed from students up to the most senior physiologists, such as Olusoga Sofola from Nigeria and Osamu Matsuo from Japan.

The Workshop was titled ‘Tune up your Teaching: Trends, Tips and Tasters’. The International Programme Committee, co-chaired by Robert Carroll and Jonathan Kibble, had created a full schedule of five plenary and five short talks, 18 parallel small-group workshops, and daily poster sessions. We learned about such trends as simulation, role of mobile devices, team-based learning, and relating laboratory data acquisition to patient cases. Tips included, for example, ways to use self-assessment, to organize regional workshops, and to get your educational research published. A plethora of nearly 50 posters acted as intriguing tasters illustrating the broad range of innovations and educational scholarship being carried out by physiology teachers around the world.

The Education Committee of IUPS has had responsibility for organizing these satellite Workshops since the first one, held in Jenolan, Australia, in 1986. ADInstruments Company generously funded each of these workshops, keeping costs to participants extremely low and pro-rated according to the World Bank classification of countries by per capita income. The Bristol workshop received additional generous sponsorship from The Physiological Society and Wiley (amongst others). Part of this funding enabled the award of five poster prizes selected by a small judging panel, who agreed that the quality of the posters – the scope of which encompassed virtually all of the countries represented at the workshop – was very high. As has become tradition, participants who were at each of the preceding workshops posed for group photos. Sadly there was only one person present, Adrianta Surjadhana, who has attended all of the workshops. He also initiated and manages the IUPS teaching listserv at iups-teaching@yahoogroups.com, so that physiology teachers around the world can keep in touch by exchanging information and news.

A report documenting these and other IUPS workshops can be accessed from the IUPS website at www.IUPS.org. We chatted about our rich memories of each workshop – I remember very well the bear tracks through our camp in the overnight snow at Pali Mountain, the rustic venue in a beautiful northern forest of Russia, explaining our posters to the Princess Royal in Inverness… Perhaps my strongest memories of Bristol will be the heat wave that enveloped England while we were there, but especially the moment at the end of the farewell party when everyone joined hands in a circle and sang Auld Lang Syne. These and other regional IUPS-sponsored workshops that bring physiologists together are important not only for mutual sharing of educational innovations and research, but perhaps even more so for maintaining the spirit of community support so vital for colleagues who are often geographically isolated and working in resource-poor regions.