Abstract
Educators, practitioners, and policy makers are calling for stronger connections between continuing education (CE) for professionals and the concerns of workplaces where these professionals work. This call for greater alignment is not unique to the health professions. Researchers within the field of higher education have long wrestled with the complexities of aligning professional learning and workplace concerns. In this study, we extend this critical line of inquiry to explore the possible conceptual intersections between two CE programs acting within a single healthcare organization. Both programs are concerned with improving patient care, primarily by changing the ways professionals think and talk with one another. However, the two programs have different historical origins: one in a workplace, the other within a university setting. Introducing the concept of “modes of ordering” as a way to analyze the curricula, we argue the programs are operating through separate logics of learning. We label these two modes of ordering: (1) learning as standardization and (2) learning as identification. Through our discussion, we explore how these different modes demand different roles for educators and participants. Ultimately, we argue that both have value. However, we also argue that educators require conceptual tools to sensitize them to the possibility of competing logics of learning and the subsequent implications for their practice as educators. In conclusion, we offer the metaphor of CE educator as choreographer, connecting concepts and practices within these logics in productive ways while continually navigating the various learning imperatives acting on professionals at any given time.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Education Development Fund, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, with matched support from the Centre for Interprofessional Education (University of Toronto). The authors would like to thank the following members of University of Toronto’s Centre for Interprofessional Education and University Health Network’s Caring Safely team for their support and thoughtful commentary on earlier drafts of this manuscript: Lynne Sinclair, Belinda Vilhena, Maria Tassone, Brenda Perkins-Meingast and Ivanka Hanley. Finally, the authors would like to thank Dr. Simon Kitto from the University of Ottawa for his commentary on the conceptual framing of this study and for his critical review of draft manuscripts.
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Rowland, P., Boyd, V., Lising, D. et al. When logics of learning conflict: an analysis of two workplace-based continuing education programs. Adv in Health Sci Educ 25, 673–689 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-019-09952-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-019-09952-y