Creating a Unique Graduate Training Program for Educator Scholars in the Anatomical Sciences

Healthcare education has made large leaps to catch up to new educational theories and best practices. Teaching roles in healthcare have traditionally fell to basic science researchers and clinicians with content area expertise but possibly little educational training. Recently, there has been a push to educate future teachers through graduate programs, most notably in anatomical education. While most of these education track PhD programs devote a large amount of training in the anatomical sciences and pedagogy skills, other educational facets are taught sparingly. Using other graduate programs in both science education and anatomy education as curricular models, the University of Mississippi Medical Center has restructured its PhD in Clinical Anatomy which itself was a restructuring of a traditional PhD in Anatomy. The original Clinical Anatomy PhD had students taking the medical anatomy courses (gross anatomy, histology, developmental, and neuroscience) and supplementing with four total credit hours of education training over three courses. Additionally, students would serve as a teaching assistant for each of the medical anatomy classes, earning additional credit hours before progressing to the dissertation phase of the program. The new Clinical Anatomy curriculum was designed to focus on three equal aspects of training; anatomical content, educational content, and educational research. The program gives equal focus to each of these important aspects as well as the integration of these areas with each other to train educator scholars capable of contributing to the education and research mission of healthcare educational programs. The anatomical content courses were restructured to focus on a foundational level of graduate anatomy content rather than limiting the training to only medical anatomy. The educational courses were expanded and focus on three areas; learning theory from both an educational and neuroscience perspective, pedagogical theory and methods, and curricular development and design. The research experiences were restructured so that the students get early exposure to research projects and statistical analysis, leading into abstract and manuscript work much earlier in their training that in previous renditions of the program. However, as with any graduate program, the graduates have to be able to fill positions for which they were trained upon graduation. Based on a recent pilot analysis of job openings seeking teachers of the various anatomy disciplines, there are a variety of open anatomy education vacancies but it is unknown if these vacancies would value students trained under these new graduate programs over the traditionally trained anatomists and basic science researchers. Support or Funding Information This project was not funded This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .