Date and Time
Monday March 25, 2024
10:15am – 12:15pm

Speaker(s)
Katie Lee Bunting
Thirusha Naidu

Introduction by Arno Kumagai

Description

Love from near and far: Critical, inspired musings on love as a transformative practice for health professions education
Katie Lee Bunting

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love … is the discovery of reality.” (Murdoch, 1997, p. 215)

Many of us come to health professions with a desire to alleviate human suffering (Piemonte, 2018). Yet, health professions education learning environments, pedagogies, and methods of assessment can de-humanize students, and in the process, de-humanize educators (Kreitzer et al., 2019). This tension between our heart’s calling and the practices of health professions education can land as moral dissonance for students and educators. Moral dissonance can threaten the educational outcomes and wellbeing of health professions students and educators and extend to adversely impacting the wellbeing of health professionals, and even patients/clients (Pololi et al., 2009). I suggest that a potential antidote to this moral dissonance is love. With roots in Black American liberation justice work (hooks, 1981; Monahan, 2011) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 2008; Ohito, 2019), love has gained increasing attention in Global North higher education as a transformative practice (Gunnarsson, 2014). Even so, love is often dismissed as silly, trite, taboo (hooks, 2001), and perceived as deviant and threatening in higher education spaces. In this talk, using a critical feminist lens and relational cultural theory, I will contextualise why this may be and invite us to envision what love, as a transformative practice, can offer health professions education, and indeed, ourselves

Love from near and far – Critical reflections on the Love Ethic in community engagement
Thirusha Naidu

In this talk I critically explore bell hooks ‘love ethic’ as a core driver for engagement in community mental health research and practice. Reflecting on my life-span work and learning as a clinician-educator and researcher   in South Africa I share  3 different personally and contextually important community research projects about  birth (teenage pregnancy), romantic love and marriage (interracial relationships) and death(HIV community palliative caregivers). Using these project narratives I reflect on epistemic and ontological trajectories of love as individual and social human experiences.  My reflections are refracted through my lived experience,  critical social theory (decolonial and feminist) lenses and creative (poetic) thought. I seek  to elucidate the love ethic and the ethics of love in community engagement beyond formal classroom contexts in health professions education.

Date and Time
Monday March 25, 2024
1:00pm – 2:30pm

Speaker(s)
Kathryn Parker
Maria Tassone
Paula Rowland

Description

This Roundtable will highlight new and emerging theories and practices in interprofessional education and transformative education and will address the following questions, how might we best integrate transformative and interprofessional education for learners at various stages of their professional development? What are some examples of transformative education already in existence? How do we engage patients in the transformative education processes in ways that are meaningful and free of harm? Theoretical, empirical and experiential ways of knowing will inform this discussion and participants will have the opportunity to engage in the conversation.

Date and Time
Tuesday March 26, 2024
9:00am – 10:30am

Speaker(s)
Rachelle Ashcroft
Ritika Goel
Sarah Gregor
Tavis Apramian

Moderated by Jerry Maniate

Description

This panel discussion will explore how we can intentionally use team-based opportunities for collaboration and education to create health promoting work and learning environments that are founded in equitable relations, processes, and structures. The panelists will draw from their diverse practical and scholarly experiences with collaborative care, and their personal experiences, to highlight the importance of integrating equity into our team contexts, while also exploring the struggles and enablers they have experienced.

Date and Time
Tuesday March 26, 2024
1:00pm – 2:30pm

Speaker(s)
Alifa Khan
Amanda Binns
Cooper Dupre
Emma Laishram
Farah Friesen
Jerome Fernando

Description

During this roundtable, we will share experiences designing and implementing Student-Led Environments in two contexts (transitions from childhood to adult life for youth with disabilities and autism care). Innovation in the form of SLEs can provide workplace-integrated learning, alleviate system and capacity pressures, and address gaps in community services. Informed by a transformative paradigm of education, we’ll share experiences of seeking to foster critical reflection and developing learners’ abilities to begin to critically reflect on norms and disrupt dominant assumptions. Learners (Emma & Jerome), Family as Faculty core teaching team member (Alifa), clinicians/researchers/educators (Amanda, Cooper, Farah) will all share their SLE experiences.

Date and Time
Monday March 25, 2024
2:45pm – 3:45pm

Speaker(s)
Nadia McLaren

Descriptions

Institutions, responding to the TRC Calls to Action (TRC Report 2015) for Reconciliation with regards to Education and Healthcare, are also looking to build safer spaces for people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. They are making efforts for decolonizing processes while simultaneously “Indigenizing” their curricula, seeking guidance in all these areas from Indigenous sources. I began my own work (unknowingly) in Reconciliation more than 20 years ago when I held the hope that sharing my story, through a documentary I set out to make in honour of my Granny, might help non-Indigenous Canadians understand better who we are (and who we have always been) as Indigenous people, communities and nations. My current work with Indigenous Health and Wellness education is still deeply rooted in the work of Reconciliation. Throughout the years, I am heartened to have collaborated with many brilliant individuals of many diverse backgrounds and experiences who are passionate about advancing this work within their own scopes and can empathize with the sometimes-unbearable levels of frustration and exhaustion, because, for a multitude of reasons, it can be challenging to find continuity, cohesion, and real deliberate institutional support for the work. My hope (as an Indigenous source) is to offer a bigger-picture approach – A kind of “how to” guide that you may (or may not) be expecting. Fair warning: What is needed for any of this work to really take root and flourish inside the walls of our institutions are some hard truths, the transparency of those hard truths, and a willingness to create more access in these 4 ways; Space; Time; Money and Power. With this presentation, I offer a framework entitled, “The Disruption Model” grounded from a perspective that has been nurtured in and guided by my own Anishnaabe background, connection, and knowledges. With many so eager to advance the work of Reconciliation, and for many important reasons, it can be/become unclear as to how to approach the work with full confidence that Indigenous peoples, their stories, and communities are actively being respected in the process. Throughout the years I have witnessed emergent themes of common missteps, tremendous gaps in understanding, as well as truly meaningful institutional learning and growth patterns that believe are worth sharing. Coming to this work of Reconciliation and Indigenous Health Education through the arts and as a storyteller has proven to be very effective in bridging cultural understanding both inside and outside the walls of institutions. “The Disruption Model” walks us through a process that illustrates working through (and the embracing of) institutional discomfort in order to achieve the transformation needed that further embraces, welcomes and meaningfully respects not only Indigenous peoples but also Indigenous knowledges, stories, innovations and success.

Date and Time
Tuesday March 26, 2024
2:45pm – 3:45pm

Speaker(s)
Carmen Black

Description

From “Already” to “Action”: A Critical Appraisal of Health Equity Agents within Medical Professionalism. Medical professionalism standards ubiquitously profess to value health equity and reject racist practice. But, how do these professed ideals manifest in real-time opportunities for health justice? This keynote speech will take a critical dive into personal experiences and cutting-edge research towards transforming medical professionalism into a set of ideals capable of true health justice transformation.

Date and Time
Wednesday March 27, 2024
10:45am – 11:45am

Speaker(s)
Anne McGuire

When it comes to creating accessible learning environments, universal design is the goal. In practice, however, access work can be messy. Students and faculty have a wide range of different capacities and support needs, and these things are not always in alignment. What do we do with and in these moments of “access friction” (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019)? Drawing on theories and practices of critical disability studies, access studies and the principles of disability justice, this presentation considers how disability-centered approaches to accessible design can enhance, refine and expand current best practices of teaching in higher education.

Date and Time
Wednesday March 27, 2024
9:00am – 10:30am

Speaker(s)
Ahmed Allawala
Jennifer Esmail

Description

The intent of this workshop is to collectively examine power as a central feature of classroom dynamics and teaching-learning processes and to generate ways to engage thoughtfully with power and knowledge in and outside of classroom learning spaces. As instructors, we have to strike a delicate balance between our institutional, pedagogical and subject-matter authority and our desire to create genuinely open and inclusive learning spaces for collective meaning-making and knowledge production. In this interactive session, we will invite participants to reflect on how to move towards more inclusive teaching by productively reimagining power-knowledge frameworks as a pedagogical practice of epistemic care.

Date and Time
Wednesday March 27, 2024
1:00pm-2:30pm

Speaker(s)
Maria Mylopoulos
Sacha Agrawal

Description

Coming Soon!

Short Talk Descriptions Coming Soon!