Teaching poverty and health: importing transformative learning into the structures and paradigms of medical education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36834/cmej.72841Abstract
Background: As a paradigm of education that emphasizes equity and social justice, transformative education aims to improve societal structures by inspiring learners to become agents of social change. In an attempt to contribute to transformative education, the University of Toronto MD program implemented a workshop on poverty and health that included tutors with lived experience of poverty. This research aimed to examine how tutors, as members of a group that faces structural oppression, understood their participation in the workshop.
Methods: This research drew on qualitative case study methodology and interview data, using the concept of transformative education to direct data analysis and interpretation.
Results: Our findings centred around two broad themes: misalignments between transformative learning and the structures of medical education; and unintended consequences of transformative education within the dominant paradigms of medical education. These misalignments and unintended consequences provided insight into how courses operating within the structures, hierarchies and paradigms of medical education may be limited in their potential to contribute to transformative education.
Conclusions: To be truly transformative, medical education must be willing to try to modify structures that reinforce oppression rather than integrating marginalized persons into educational processes that maintain social inequity.
Metrics
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Carrie Cartmill, Cynthia Whitehead, Esther Ihekwoaba, Ritika Goel, Samantha Green, Mona Haidar, Dawnmarie Harriott, Sarah Wright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Submission of an original manuscript to the Canadian Medical Education Journal will be taken to mean that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication. If accepted for publication, it will be published online and it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, for commercial purposes, in any language, without the consent of the publisher.
Authors who publish in the Canadian Medical Education Journal agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Canada Licence. This licence allows anyone to copy and distribute the article for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given. For details of the rights an author grants users of their work, please see the licence summary and the full licence.