Empowering medical students as agents of curricular change: a value-added approach to student engagement in medical education

Abstract

One area in which medical students can add significant value is medical education, and involving them as key stakeholders in their education can have a profound impact on students and the institutions that serve them. However, detailed descriptions of the structure, implementation and quality of programs facilitating student engagement are lacking. We describe the structure of a novel student engagement program at the University of Illinois College of Medicine-Chicago (UICOM-Chicago) known as the Student Curricular Board (SCB). We surveyed 563 medical students across all levels of training at our institution in order to examine the impact of this program, including its strengths and potential areas of improvement. The SCB serves as a highly structured and collaborative student group that has far-reaching involvement from course-level program evaluation to longitudinal curriculum design. Medical stu-Joseph R. Geraghty and Alexandria N. Young contributed equally to this work. A version of the ideas described herein was presented as a poster and oral presentation at the Association of American Medical Colleges Central Group on Educational Affairs (CGEA) meeting in Chicago, IL, 29-31 March 2017.

Learner involvement in the co-creation of teaching and learning: AMEE Guide No. 138

“…It has been suggested to let learners apply for involvement in co-creation by submitting a letter on why they want to participate and what they think they are able to contribute (Cook-Sather and Luz 2015; Jensen and Bennett 2016). Ideally, learners selected to engage in co-creation are motivated to contribute to the improvement of education (Geraghty et al 2020;Martens et al 2020), hold a proactive and critical attitude (Meeuwissen et al 2019;Geraghty et al 2020…”

Students’ engagement in the medical school in Nepal based on ASPIRE criteria

“…Nearly all (96%) students of University of Illinois College of Medicine-Chicago agreed that opportunities for involvement of students in curriculum are important [8]. UCMS must also provide this opportunity to students.…”

Student participation in undergraduate medical education: a continuous collective endeavour

“…The article by Geraghty et al 'Empowering medical students as agents of curricular change: A valueadded approach to student engagement in medical education' [7] presents a highly structured approach to how students can contribute to medical education. The authors describe the implementation of a Stu-dent Curricular Board which offers formally trained students opportunities to be involved in evaluation and design of courses and clerkships on the one hand, and in curriculum-overarching committees and largescale curriculum reforms on the other hand.…”

“…Geraghty et al's paper demonstrates the effort of higher education institutions to respond to the call of student participation, while simultaneously pointing at a need to better facilitate institutes to integrate students into ongoing curricular processes. Some examples are given to move beyond giving feedback and formalities such as involvement in longitudinal curriculum design, pilots for entering residency training, and issues on diversity and wellness [7].…”

“…To gain deeper understanding of student participation processes and outcomes, disentanglement of both terminology and approaches is needed [8]. In the literature, a variety of terms are used when discussing student participation, such as 'student leaders' and 'students as agents' [7,8]. In this commentary, we use the term 'active student participation' to describe a general understanding of student participation that is referred to in many recommendations.…”