Keynotes

We are delighted to be joined by

Professor Jennifer Cleland

Jennifer Cleland is President’s Chair in Medical Education and Vice Dean (Education), Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University Singapore.   Prior to coming to Singapore in January 2020 she was the inaugural holder of the John Simpson Chair of Medical Education Research at the University of Aberdeen, UK and Director of the Scottish Medical Education Research Consortium (2015-2020).  She was the Chair of the Association for Medical Education (ASME) from 2013-2018 and Chair of the Association for Medical Education Europe (AMEE) Research Committee (2014-2018).

She holds Adjunct or Honorary Professor roles at numerous universities across three continents. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, and the Academy of Medical Educators, and an Associate Fellow of the Faculty of Surgical Trainers, Royal College of Surgeons (Edin).  She is a member of AMEE’s Executive Committee. She holds Editorial positions with the journals Medical Education and Advances in Health Sciences Education.

Professor Cleland is known internationally for her research in the areas of student selection and widening access to medicine, performance and assessment, career progression and choices in medicine. Her research is characterized by inter-disciplinarity and methodological flexibility. She has published over 200 academic papers in top ranking journals.  She is co-editor with Steve Durning, of Researching Medical Education, used as a core text for MHPE globally, with the second edition out in November 2022.

Title: Shifting sands: What is true, what is evidence and who has authority?

Health professions education is a relatively young field of enquiry.  Yet already it is clear that, as a field, we are evolving from reporting “what we did”, to an increased use of more diverse, and nuanced, theoretical frameworks in the qualitative studies, and more sophisticated questions in the quantitative ones. With this has come a realisation of two factors.  That knowledge advances through the work of - ideally interdisciplinary - teams and scholarly communities, not individuals working alone.  And being open to new ideas, theories, methodologies and worldviews is critical to advance the field.  In this talk I reflect on the literature and my own academic autobiography, to consider how health professions education research continues to evolve, excite and lead to ever more understanding and further questions.

Professor Saleem Razack

Saleem Razack is a practicing pediatric intensive care physician and director of the pediatric intensive care unit at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.  He is a professor of pediatrics and health sciences education, dually appointed in Pediatrics and in the Institute for Health Sciences Education at McGill University.  His academic focus has always been within health professions education, specifically, issues of equity, diversity, inclusion and anti-racist educational practice.  His research has included a discourse analysis of equity, diversity, and inclusion within student selection to medicine, and he has since moved towards understanding concepts such as meritocracy and professionalism within medicine with respect to equity, diversity and inclusion.  He is currently a coinvestigator on several grants studying social accountability discourses in medical education, and how patient experience can be brought into curricular design.  He has been a residency program director, assistant dean of admissions, and was the inaugural director of McGill’s Social Accountability and Community Engagement Office.

He does not apologize for being a highly subspecialized technologically based specialist who cares deeply about the impact of social context and structural determinants on the health of the patients he cares for in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Montreal Children’s Hospital.  On the contrary, his rallying metaphor for this type of medical practice is one of collision – finding beauty, reward and witnessing healing in the tragic impact between life-threatening critical illness in children and their social contexts.

 He is an older dad of 4-year-old twins, in a two dad situation, and obsesses about acquiring the competency of French braiding, which is unlikely to happen.

Title: The Unbearable Whiteness of Professionalism:  Casting a Critical Gaze on Professional Identity Formation

After 30 years as a respected medical educator in a professional identity formation course in a “top” medical school, a racialized educator feels she just can’t teach “this stuff, this way anymore”.  It feels so inauthentic, “white” and “male”. She asks herself: are we fostering the development of professional identities which will care for diverse populations well in the future?

In this plenary, the presenter will discuss the discourses of professionalism in medicine, and the resulting social constructs, through the lens of critical, critical race, and intersectionality theory.  Using case-based examples, such as the one above, he will draw the link between how professionalism is taught as a way of being and as a form of behaviour regulation, and how it manifests as a political force within society.  Drawing on the work of Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, he will seek to reimagine a professionalism of solidarity with populations served, which has social justice and the dismantling of discriminatory structures within health care as a key tenet in its way of being in the world.