The Role of Simulation in Pedagogies of Higher Education for the Health Professions: Through a Practice-Based Lens

Abstract

The preparation of future professionals for practice is a key focus of higher education institutions. Among a range of approaches is the use of simulation pedagogies. While simulation is often justified as a direct bridge between higher education and professional practice, this paper questions this easy assumption. It develops a conceptually driven argument to cast new light on simulation and its unarticulated potential in professional formation. The argument unfolds in, and is illustrated via, three accounts of a simulation event in an Australian undergraduate nursing program. This begins with a familiar approach, moves to one that problematizes this through a focus on disruption, culminating in a third that draws on socio-material theorisations. Here, simulation is conceived as emergent, challenging stable notions of fidelity, common in simulation literature. New possibilities of simulation in the production of agile practitioners and learners in practice are surfaced. This paper extends and enriches thinking by providing distinctive new ways of understanding simulation and the relationship it affords between education and professional practice, and by illuminating the untapped potential of simulation for producing agile practitioners.

Theorising simulation in higher education: difficulty for learners as an emergent phenomenon†

“…The argument in this paper remains at a super-ordinate level, proposing the disruptive value of a sociomaterial approach as per general, shared tenets (not least, the idea of emergence), rather than being tied to specific concepts associated with particular versions of sociomaterialism. This extends a new body of work that has applied sociomaterial approaches to medical education more generally (Fenwick 2014), medical simulation (Fenwick and Abrandt Dahlgren 2015), the philosophical foundation of simulation pedagogy (Hopwood et al 2014), development of agile learners through simulation (Rooney et al 2015), and knowledge practices in scenario, observation and control spaces (Ahn et al 2015).…”

“…In this the conundrum highlighted to us by educators concerns offering simulation to cohorts with a very broad range of prior clinical experience, coupled with significant variation in cultural background (for a full description, see Rooney et al 2015). This complexity is intensified because the sequencing of simulation in relation to clinical placements within the overall degree is not uniform.…”

“…Arguably there are valuable learning outcomes here, concerning the skills and confidence to cope with the unknown (see Rooney et al 2015), however such pedagogic intentions sit uncomfortably with approaches that are protocol-driven, linked to pre-specified and measurable outcomes.…”

“…To date, sociomaterial research has offered a radical rethinking of the philosophical underpinnings of simulation pedagogy in higher education (Hopwood et al 2014), and provided a fresh basis for analysing the pedagogic value and potential of existing practices (Ahn et al 2015;Rooney et al 2015). However, sociomaterialism has not yet been used as a basis to explore important questions about difficulty for learners in simulations.…”

Designing and Developing New VET Curricula to Address Skills Gaps in the Aeronautics Industry

“…• A learning object is a short multimedia based training session [17]. They will correspond to a total of 2 h of multimedia presentations complemented with guidelines on how the training material can be implemented.…”