Julia Choate, Monash University

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.119.44

I was the 2018 recipient of the Otto Hutter Physiology Teaching Prize, awarded to a Member of The Physiological Society for innovation and excellence in undergraduate physiology teaching. In response to this, I was surprised to receive congratulatory emails from the US, Canada, UK and Australia, from collaborators, colleagues, the undergraduates I teach and highly regarded physiology professors I had never met. These emails were a welcome boost to my confidence as an educator and acknowledgement of the global recognition of The Physiological Society. When compared to scientific research, there are few education awards or grants. The Otto Hutter Physiology Teaching Prize has also enabled me to pay an assistant to support teaching innovations and to complete some education research papers. I thank The Society for this opportunity and I think that it is commendable that The Society supports physiology educators.

During these unprecedented times, when we are teaching our undergraduates remotely, synchronously or asynchronously (i.e. teaching with/without real-time interactions) and online, I found myself revisiting some education publications. These publications focussed on inquiry-based teaching, physiology core concepts, and, given the evolving crisis in graduate employability, undergraduate career development.

Physiology inquiry-based teaching (Patil, Karve and DiCarlo, 1993)

With the desire to enhance student engagement, and to improve their understanding of integrative physiology, I developed student-centred, inquiry-based learning activities for lectures, laboratory classes and, prompted by the current COVID-19 situation, for Zoom-based online learning. My inquiry-based activities for integrative cardiovascular physiology drew inspiration from a paper by Patil et al. (1993). This manuscript describes a fictitious laboratory exercise that examines the cardiovascular responses to exercise in a sedentary individual, an endurance trained athlete, an individual with quadriplegia, and a recipient of a heart transplant. Students are told that the heart transplant recipient has no autonomic innervation of the heart and the individual with quadriplegia has no sympathetic innervation of the heart (and no motor control below a spinal lesion). Based on graphical representations of the cardiovascular responses to exercise, students need to correlate each of the subjects with the relevant line on the graph. I modified the ideas from this paper to produce inquiry-based activities that follow on from the teaching of the control of heart rate and stroke volume. I have found that these activities enable students to test their understanding, plus they raise interesting “online” conversations about how the different subjects respond to exercise.

Teaching physiology via core concepts (Michael, Cliff, McFarland, Modell and Wright, 2017)

With so much physiology content and not enough room in the curriculum, as physiology educators we make decisions about the content in the curriculum. This is evident if you pick up the prescribed physiology textbook for your students – I would be lucky to teach more than half of the content in the textbook. Considering this overwhelming physiology content and student feedback that physiology is difficult to learn and understand, Joel Michael led a team that developed physiology core concepts or the “big ideas” of physiology (Michael et al. 2017). They argue that physiology could be better taught by incorporating these core concepts into the curriculum. Michael et al. (2017) developed and defined physiology core concepts and described how they could be integrated into physiology teaching. They surveyed over 60 physiology educators about what core concepts of physiology they wanted their students to understand. This resulted in 15 core concepts for undergraduate physiology education, with “homeostasis” and “cell-to-cell communications” as top-rated concepts (see Michael and McFarland, 2011 and Table 1 for descriptions of the 15 core concepts). The concepts overlap, with multiple core concepts linked into the teaching of physiology topics, such as the regulation of blood pressure.

I find that students try to rote learn physiology, cramming their study into the day prior to a major test, and this does not help them to understand integrative physiology, nor does it help them with long-term learning. Thus, I am interested to see if I can frame the teaching of physiology around these physiology core concepts. I initially mapped the core concepts to the physiology curriculum for the physiology major of the Bachelor of Science degree-program at my university. This process identified that only a handful of the concepts were not covered in the existing curriculum. I have plans (following recommendations from Michael et al. 2017) to articulate and assess the physiology core concepts, but this will need to wait until I have completed this hectic online semester!   

Supporting undergraduate career development (Dacre Pool and Sewell, 2007)

Five years ago, there was a steady stream of physiology undergraduates into my office who were anxious about their careers. Furthermore, a survey of final year students found that a third of them were uncertain about their careers (Choate & Long, 2019). With all of this career anxiety and uncertainty, I decided that I needed to support students’ career development, but I had no understanding of career development and minimal awareness about careers for physiology or biomedical graduates, aside from my own experiences as a scientist and academic. I thus teamed up with a university careers educator and we put together an in-curriculum (and assessed) career development program (Choate, Demaria, Etheve, Cran, Carroll, 2019). A publication that I found invaluable for this process was Dacre Pool & Sewell’s (2007) ‘practical model for graduate employability’. This model has the acronym CareerEDGE, after the five key components for graduate employability: Career development learning, Experience of work and life, Degree subject knowledge, understanding and skills, Generic skills and Emotional intelligence. Students should be provided with opportunities (during their degree-program) to develop these five components, to reflect and evaluate on these experiences, and this should help them to develop self-efficacy, self-confidence and self-esteem. Taken together, these components of the CareerEDGE model are considered to provide students with “the skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make individuals more likely to gain employment” (Yorke, 2006, p.11). Indeed, when we embedded (and assessed) the components of the CareerEDGE model into our degree-program, this led to enhanced student awareness of career options and development of their employability skills (Choate et al. 2019).

Associate Professor Julia Choate is the director of physiology education in the Department of Physiology at Monash University. With a passion for improving the student experience, Julia has developed and evaluated inquiry-based teaching, virtual experiments and professional development programs. These initiatives have been published and recognised with numerous teaching awards including our Otto Hutter Teaching Prize.

References:

Choate JK, Demaria M, Etheve M, Cran S, Carroll D (2019). A professional development program with an assessed ePortfolio; a practical solution for engaging undergraduates’ with their career development in large student cohorts. Journal of Learning and Teaching for Graduate Employability. 10(2), 86–103. https://doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2019vol10no2art788

Choate JK, Long H (2019). Why Do Science Students Study Physiology? Career Priorities of 21st Century Physiology Undergraduates. HAPS-Educator, Journal of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society. 23(1). https://doi.org/10.21692/haps.2019.010

Dacre Pool L, Sewell P (2007). The key to employability: Developing a practical model of graduate employability. Education and Training, 49(4), 277-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910710754435

Michael J, McFarland J (2011). The core principles (“big ideas”) of physiology: results of faculty surveys. Adv Physiol Educ 35: 336–341, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00004.2011.

Michael J, Cliff C, McFarland J, Modell H, Wright A (2017). The Core Concepts of Physiology: A New Paradigm for Teaching Physiology. New York: Springer Nature, 2017.

Patil RD, Karve SV, DiCarlo SE (1993). Integrated cardiovascular physiology: a laboratory exercise. Advances in Physiology Education. 265(6), 20-31. https://doi.org/10.1152/advances.1993.265.6.S20

Yorke (2006). Learning & Employability: Series One. Employability in higher education: what it is – what it is not. The Higher Education Academy. See: https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/hea-learning-employability_series_one.pdf