Using technology to accomplish comparability of provision in distributed medical education in Canada: an actor–network theory ethnography

Abstract

This article is derived from a three-year ethnography of distributed medical education at one Canadian University across two Canadian provinces. It explores the ways in which students and staff work inside the technologically rich teaching environments within which the curriculum is delivered. Drawing on data constructed through observations, interviews and photographs, the article seeks to explain how the key concept of comparability of provision is accomplished. The article concludes that the education received at both campuses is comparable. However, simply to attribute this comparability to the technology itself is to ignore the central role that is played by the staffacademic, administrative and audiovisual. The article concludes by arguing that, notwithstanding the fact that people will always respond to technologies in unanticipated ways, the curriculum within which they are enfolded is sufficiently robust to accommodate such practices whilst at the same time maintaining the quality of the provision.

Implementation and impact of indigenous health curricula: a systematic review

“…We analysed how specific ontologies influenced interactions between actors within a curriculum development network (staff, learners, teaching institutions, accreditation policies and standards, timetable formats, resourcing of the curriculum, curriculum content and curriculum management). This theory enabled us to explore how events occurred and what the mediators (enablers) or intermediaries (barriers) for curriculum development were within these contexts …”

Actor-network theory and ethnography: Sociomaterial approaches to researching medical education

“…Tummons and colleagues [ 56 ] observed distributed medical education lectures (108 h), explicitly foregrounding material actants (specifically, videoconferencing technologies) connecting learners at multiple sites. By focusing on buttons, microphones, screens and cameras, they were able to see beyond taken for granted discourses about comparability and good teaching practice, making visible that technologies of distributed medical education lectures are not a neutral backdrop to human activity, but rather, actively shape new teaching and learning practices in these settings.…”

Ethnography, materiality, and the principle of symmetry: problematising anthropocentrism and interactionism in the ethnography of education

“…Actor-network theory, and the principle of symmetry Actor-network theory remains an under-used sociological/philosophical approach within educational research more broadly. It has been employed to explore a number of diverse aspects of educational provision, including university physics and business curricula (Nespor, 1994), PISA testing (Gorur, 2011), higher education policy and the Bologna Process (Sarauw, 2016), teaching in nurseries (Plum, 2018), professional standards for teachers (Mulcahy, 2011), professional education (Tummons, 2010), medical education (Tummons et al, 2018), the relationship of technology to theory in education research (Thumlert et al, 2015) and, of particular importance to the argument that we are building here, the construction of knowledge through ethnographic research in education (Larsson, 2006). It has been described as: a component of ethnography that is concerned with "the processes of ordering that generate effects such as technologies" (Law, 1994: 18); and a "way of talking… [that] allows us to look at identity and practice as functions of ongoing interactions with distant elements (animate and inanimate) of networks that have been mobilized along intersecting trajectories" (Nespor, 1994: 12-13).…”