Search Results for
"human"

Although there is evidence to support implementing interprofessional education (IPE) in the health sciences, widespread implementation in health professions education is not yet a reality. Challenges include the diversity in location and settings of schools and colleges, ie, many are not located within an academic health center. Faculty members may not have the necessary skill set for teaching in an IPE environment. Certain topics or themes in a pharmacy curriculum may be more appropriate than others for teaching in an IPE setting. This paper offers solutions to teaching IPE in diverse settings, the construct for implementing a faculty development program for IPE, and suggested curricular topics with their associated learning objectives, potential teaching methods, and timelines for implementation.

In this article, we examine the extent and the causes of ethnic inequalities in access to apprenticeship training positions within the German system of vocational training. Analyses are based on pooled data from three surveys of high school graduates conducted at the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB). The role of the following differences between German and applicants with an immigrant background for vocational training positions is analyzed: their preferences for certain occupational fields, their endowment with resources relevant to the integration of the individual in the labor market, and the opportunities available in the vocational training market. We can show, first, that the chances of finding a vocational training position are substantially lower for young - especially male - adults with an immigrant background even if their occupational preferences, their human capital endowment, and their first language are taken into account. Furthermore, there is no evidence that German and immigrant background youths differ substantially in terms of their job-search strategies. Our analyses show, secondly, that even those immigrant background youths who did manage to find a vocational training position are only half as likely as young Germans to be trained in their preferred occupational field, The large gender differences within the immigrant background group in particular suggest that ethnic discrimination processes on the part of potential employers may play a more important role in explaining ethnic inequalities in the access to vocational training positions than in other dimensions of labor market integration. This is probably related to specificities in those vocational training sectors that are characterized by a comparatively low productivity of applicants and by a shortage of vocational training positions. © C Lucius & Lucius Verlag Stuttgart.

Those who educate medical students and physicians work in a world suffused with the concept of competency. This article examines the intellectual origins and hidden assumptions of this concept and argues that it is an inadequate, and even harmful, concept to use as a guiding motif for professional education. The competency model-which tends to be top-down and prescriptive-does not provide the framework for objective educational assessment that it claims to provide. The alternative apprenticeship model is more appropriate for professional education and is more consistent with what psychological research has shown about the acquisition of expertise. © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

This article conceptualizes and elaborates what constitutes learning experiences. It does so from a perspective that centres on experiences as arising through relations between social and personal worldsyet also acknowledges the mediation of brute facts (i.e., nature). The social contributions are twofold, yet quite distinct. First, there are immediate social experiences that are projected by the particular socially and culturally derived events (i.e., activities and interactions) that individuals encounter, often in circumstances shaped by socially situational and physical factors. Second, there are socio-personal legacies, comprising individuals' cognitive experience, that arise through their ongoing engagements with social experiences throughout life histories. Although socially derived, these legacies are person dependent and may be personally idiosyncratic. Of importance, they shape how individuals construe and construct what they experience during, engage with, and learn from these events. Learning experiences, therefore, comprise a negotiation between the suggestions of social and physical world and individuals' construal of what the world projects. These negotiations are also shaped and mediated by brute facts, such as maturation. Underpinning this conception of learning experiences are interdependencies between the social and personal contributions, which are negotiated in ways that are necessarily relational in terms of the exercise of personal agency and the suggestion of social and physical forms. It is through these negotiations that individuals' change or learn and society's norms and practices are remade and transformed. Given this duality, the activities and interactions that comprise learning experiences stand as important bases for understanding (a) individual change or learning and (b) the ongoing process of remaking cultural practices. It also extends the concept of interpsychological processes as being relational and needing to include the contributions and mediations of brute facts. Copyright © Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative human Cognition.

The pharmaceutical consultation offered to liver transplant patients is one of the components of therapeutic education. The content of this consultation has been designed on the basis of research results led in the field of health communication. This research has highlighted the need to clarify to the patient the aims and format of the consultation, to obtain patient approval, and to elicit patient participation in the elaboration of the treatment plan. Studying and taking into account patient representations of transplantation, of transplant treatment and rejection is indispensable to the design of an efficient communication plan. Setting up this consultation requires initial training or continuing vocational training of the pharmacist - this training will address issues in psychology, cognitive science and health communication. No such training is currently available in universities and needs to be set up. It should be followed by practice and training during internships in hospitals and community pharmacies. © 2008 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

The humanities offer great potential for enhancing professional and humanistic development in medical education. Yet, although many students report benefit from exposure to the humanities in their medical education, they also offer consistent complaints and skepticism. The authors offer a pedagogical definition of the medical humanities, linking it to medicine as a practice profession. They then explore three student critiques of medical humanities curricula: (1) the content critique, examining issues of perceived relevance and intellectual bait-and-switch, (2) the teaching critique, which examines instructor trustworthiness and perceived personal intrusiveness, and (3) the structural/placement critique, or how and when medical humanities appear in the curriculum. Next, ways are suggested to tailor medical humanities to better acknowledge and reframe the needs of medical students. These include ongoing cross-disciplinary reflective practices in which intellectual tools of the humanities are incorporated into educational activities to help students examine and, at times, contest the process, values, and goals of medical practice. This systematic, pervasive reflection will organically lead to meaningful contributions from the medical humanities in three specific areas of great interest to medical educators: professionalism, "narrativity," and educational competencies. Regarding pedagogy, the implications of this approach are an integrated required curriculum and innovative concepts such as "applied humanities scholars." In turn, systematic integration of humanities perspectives and ways of thinking into clinical training will usefully expand the range of metaphors and narratives available to reflect on medical practice and offer possibilities for deepening and strengthening professional education. © 2009 Association of American Medical Colleges.

The concept of individual responsibility has taken on a signi?cance comparable to that of ‘choice’ in the global rise of neo-liberalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The rise of neo-liberalism is most often analysed through the lenses of theory, governmentality and societal structures. There has been a tendency for an- ysis to become overly abstract with the subjective experiences of the social actors missing dimensions in the literature. This book draws on more than 20 years of international research that has focused on the subjective experiences of people as actors in changing social landscapes. These landscapes are differently positioned politically, economically and socially, in relation to the rise of neo-liberalism. Comparisons enable the differences in people’s experiences to be located, explored and explained in relation to different soc- economic landscapes, thus throwing into relief the effects of neo-liberal policies where they are found. My approach is to create an extended dialogue between ideas and evidence, starting close to home, and then extending to speci?c international comparisons and to wider explorations of the central themes of the book: human agency and social responsibility. Finally, I return to social landscapes of Britain, to review the position and potential for social change in societies that exemplify what Sennett has termed ‘Anglo-American regimes’, in contrast to ‘Rhine regimes’ as exempli?ed by Germany. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.

Background: Most of the efforts to reduce teenagers' tobacco addiction have focused on smoking prevention and little on smoking cessation. A smoking cessation program (TABADO study), associating pharmacologic and cognitive-behavioural strategy, on a particularly vulnerable population (vocational trainees), was developed. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of the program which was offered to all smokers in a population aged 15 to 20 years in Vocational Training Centers (VTC). This paper presents the TABADO study protocol. Methods: The study is quasi-experimental, prospective, evaluative and comparative and takes place during the 2 years of vocational training. The final population will be composed of 2000 trainees entering a VTC in Lorraine, France, during the 2008-2009 period. The intervention group (1000 trainees) benefited from the TABADO program while no specific intervention took place in the "control" group (1000 trainees) other than the treatment and education services usually available. Our primary outcome will be the tobacco abstinence rate at 12 months. Discussion. If the program proves effective, it will be a new tool in the action against smoking in populations that have been seldom targeted until now. In addition, the approach could be expanded to other young subjects from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in the context of a public health policy against smoking among adolescents. © 2009 Minary et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Courses preparing early childhood professionals through institutes of technical and further education utilise competency standards to guide the assessment of students during professional experience. Some universities offering early childhood teacher education courses use the term 'competencies' in practicum assessment forms and draw on teacher competency standards. This article explores how discourses of competence produced within positivist and liberal humanist discourses shape, guide and direct (govern) tertiary supervisors' beliefs about and understandings of the legitimacy of their professional judgement. Tertiary supervisors take up these discourses and use them as the basis upon which they govern themselves. The author argues that one of the effects of governmentality in this instance is that tertiary supervisors regulate and silence their professional judgement and defer to discourses of scientific rationality when assessing students on practicum placements. They produce assessment strategies that enable them to hide their subjective judgement within what appears to be a logical, rational and objective assessment process and position themselves as the rational, objective assessor, and, at the same time, the fair, responsible tertiary supervisor.

The unprecedented extent of privatisation of provision in the school system on a for-profit basis is clearly one of the most significant transformations accomplished by the Blair government. However, another aspect of private sector involvement has proved much more problematic: the direct involvement of employers in the formation of the future workforce, in two forms: employer-led vocationally-oriented diplomas and state schools - Academies - run by business interests. Both strategies remain key policies of the Brown government and have been endorsed by the Conservative opposition. However, whether these two strategies can provide the basis of a stable policy settlement depends upon the extent to which they prove capable of delivering the 'human capital' the economy is claimed to require. This paper assesses the evidence.