MANUSCRIPT: Teaching, Learning, Complexity and Health Professions Education
The purpose of this paper is to disturb the way we think about teaching and learning and to offer a view of health professions education from the perspective of complexity thinking. To discuss complexity and the profound shift it makes with current thinking it is helpful to recall that prior to the 16th century it was believed, in the Western world, that all things on earth and in the heavens were guided by a divine hand. Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Descartes, and Bacon, among others, challenged and changed the status quo. Exploration and the gathering of evidence through experimentation, together with the rise individualism helped give birth to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Descartes wrote that everything should be broken down into its smallest component parts in order to understand the whole. This has had a profound and lasting effect palpable today in health professions education where mechanistic explanations still prevail and reductionist approaches to curriculum rooted in Cartesian and Newtonian linear causality are common. This is the dominant paradigm of western science and society. It is how we organize our schools. It is how we teach.
Written by Brian S McGowan, PhD
Dr. McGowan has served in leadership positions in numerous medical educational organizations and commercial supporters and is a Fellow of the Alliance (FACEhp). He founded the Outcomes Standardization Project, launched and hosted the Alliance Podcast, and most recently launched and hosts the JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD podcast. In 2012 he Co-Founded ArcheMedX, Inc, a healthcare informatics and e-learning company to apply his research in practice.
