Mariana Hewson

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Currently, westerners and educational leaders trained in science know little about traditional indigenous knowledge, and it does not feature in many science curricula. This is surprising since the fundamental components of indigenous knowledge concern topics essential for the well-being of humans everywhere. In this chapter, I consider the teaching...

Three incidents concerning caregivers and patients from different cultural groups illustrate medical challenges. A brief history of medicine in Africa during the colonial era illuminates some of the difficulties. I introduce the concept of medical pluralism and related ways of thinking as a synergistic solution. Finally I offer an approach to an in...

The ways of knowing of indigenous Africans and westerners are described. I look at the problem of how westerners discredit the knowledge system of others. I consider the effect of the dominance of the western way of knowing imposed on Africa during the colonial period.

The healing practice of traditional healers is described in terms of: concepts of illness and health, the consultative process, diagnosis, treatment(s), and prevention. A traditional healer describes her healing practice. Incidents involving divination and the extraction of evil spirits are described. I offer a comparison between western and Africa...

In this chapter I return to thinking about teaching science. A failed university course in Lesotho suggested a reexamination of basic principles of teaching science in Africa. I offer a model of teaching and learning, and discuss the criteria for a functional educational curriculum. My recent investigations of the indigenous knowledge of traditiona...

In trans-cultural clinical teaching, differences in language, expectations, or cultural (indigenous) knowledge, beliefs and skills can cause problems. Medical students with such problems are challenging to their medical teachers. Clinical teaching offers many opportunities in which indigenous knowledge can be revealed and managed appropriately to f...

I describe how individuals decide to become traditional healers, their initiation process, training, accreditation, and ongoing education. A traditional healer describes how she was ‘called’ to be a healer. I describe some differences between becoming a healer in Africa and the west.

I describe how the Apartheid government instituted the unequal and unfair provision of schooling for black children in South Africa. A brief outline of early educational psychology reflects the distance between, and misunderstanding of western researchers concerning black children. I describe how the increasing stranglehold of Apartheid affected ev...

In the context of early experiences of teaching in South Africa and Lesotho, I describe how my curiosity led to two research projects concerning density and heat. I focus on theories of teaching and learning, especially students’ acquisition of scientific knowledge. I discuss the role of alternative conceptions in learning, and the implications for...

I describe the next steps in the research study in which I elicit traditional healers’ ideas about indigenous teaching strategies. I offer a model of teaching and learning, and a more detailed description of my teaching strategy: tailored teaching. I present two examples of how indigenous knowledge could be worked into classroom science lessons. I...

This book describes the gaps and commonalities in African and Western ways of knowing concerning science and medicine. It reflects a personal journey in teaching science and trans-cultural medicine in the African setting. In addition, it describes how the author became an initiate as a traditional healer in Zimbabwe. The book combines educational t...

I discuss different ways of knowing as conceived by western and indigenous people. I set out to find ways to build bridges between these different ways in order to improve teaching and learning in Africa.

African traditional healers (THs) were interviewed in order to explore their indigenous knowledge (IK) concerning natural science topics and science teaching, with potential implications for school science curriculum. First, THs in Lesotho were interviewed about their general ideas and these were compared with ideas obtained from THs in a previous...

An innovative school science curriculum in South Africa requires the inclusion of African societal/cultural knowledge, such as indigenous knowledge (IK). The main project involves introducing argumentation to accomplish this requirement. We used a focus group plus critical incident technique to ascertain nine teachers' understandings of argumentati...

Local experts from a non-western culture (e.g., traditional healers) discuss their views of the world and their potential role in improving the health and well-being of African children and providing a bridge between the non-western and western viewpoints. The traditional healers interviewed in these studies expressed a coherent view about what cou...

Science laboratories in university biology courses are usually designed by simply specifying student tasks and experiments. Unfortunately novice teachers often have weak preparation in the effective design of laboratory-based activities. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is the combination of the knowledge of specific science content and pedagogy...

This ethnographic study explores the question of whether cultural metaphors concerning heat still are subscribed to by a heterogeneous group of Sotho people in Southern Africa no longer strictly traditional in their way of life. The authors seek to investigate the implications of this particular metaphor for the learning of orthodox scientific theo...

This is an exploratory attempt to investigate the organization of knowledge in preclinical and clinical textbooks. A theoretical framework to understand the role of textbooks in medical education is developed. An analysis of preclinical and clinical textbooks indicates that preclinical textbooks organize the same field of knowledge differently to c...

South Africa’s new and revised National Curriculum Statement implicitly suggests the integration of indigenous knowledge (IK) into the science curriculum so that learners can, inter alia, learn within the context of their cultural knowledge. Unfortunately teachers do not necessarily know about the various indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) within S...

To describe the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare's (AACH) Faculty Development Course on Teaching the Medical Interview and report a single year's outcomes. We delivered a Faculty Development course on Teaching the Medical Interview whose theme was relationship-centered care to a national and international audience in 1999. Participan...

Objective: To meet the increasing patient interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), conventional physicians need to understand CAM, be willing to talk with their patients about CAM, and be open to recommending selected patients to appropriate CAM modalities. We aimed to raise physicians' awareness of, and initiate attitudinal chang...

26297 -THE IMPACT OF A FORMAL MENTORSHIP PROGRAM IN AN ANESTHESIOLOGY ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT Jerome O'Hara MD, Bierer Beth, MEd; Mariana Hewson, PhD; Stevens Sara, Armin Schubert, MD, MBA The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OHIO, USA INTRODUCTION: A mentor is a person who has acquired experience and seniority; who is more than a teacher or col...

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education mandates that radiology residency programs teach communication skills to residents. The purpose of this paper is to present a mnemonic, RADPED, that can be used to enhance communication in the radiology setting. It reminds the resident of the salient points to address during an imaging encoun...

Although the lecture appears to be synonymous with continuing medical education (CME), the effectiveness of lecture-based CME remains in question. Despite conflicting data, the lecture continues to be widely used in the delivery of CME. This study was conducted to identify the attributes of an effective medical lecture and to assess the impact of a...

Objective: This article describes the creation of a standardized comprehensive resident curriculum in pediatric radiology that uses adult learning principles authored by international experts and addresses the six general competencies required by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Conclusion: Web-based learning with an onl...

Residency programs must prepare physicians to practice in the current health care environment. This mandate is reflected in 3 of the 6 competency domains now required by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education: systems-based practice, interpersonal skills and communication, and practice-based learning and improvement. An invitation...

The purpose of this study was to test a three-day course model for medical school faculty designed to promote self-directed learning, teaching skills, personal awareness and interdisciplinary collegiality. The training program described was conducted three times in our medical school. Fifty-eight faculty from 11 clinical departments have participat...

The assessment of the effectiveness of faculty development programs is increasingly important in medical schools and academic medical centers but is difficult to accomplish. We investigated the usefulness of retrospective self-assessments by program participants in combination with independent ratings of teaching performance by their trainees. We u...

In a study conducted over 3 large symposia on intensive review of internal medicine, we previously assessed the features that were most important to course participants in evaluating the quality of a lecture. In this study, we attempt to validate these observations by assessing prospectively the extent to which ratings of specific lecture features...

This essay describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a theory-based faculty development program for physician-educators in medicine and pediatrics at The Cleveland Clinic. The program comprises a 12-hour course (focused on skills in precepting, bedside teaching, leading small-group discussions, giving lectures, designing curricul...

Instruments that rate teaching effectiveness provide both positive and negative feedback to clinician-educators, helping them improve their teaching. The authors developed the Clinical Teaching Effectiveness Instrument, which was theory-based and generic across their entire academic medical center, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. They tested it fo...

This report describes the development and psychometric qualities of a new instrument to assess clinical teaching effectiveness in medical education. The strength of the instrument is seen to lie in the qualitative development process involving iterative checking with key stakeholders; its high reliability, validity, and feasibility; and its ease of...

One task of medical anthropologists is to search for similarities and differences among cultural conceptions of illness and healing. This search may identify common, if not universal, characteristics of healing and effective patient care. This paper describes traditional healing practices in southern Africa as related by six traditional healers. De...

A growing number of residency programs are preparing their graduates for the realities of managed care practice. In 1996, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, a private, nonprofit academic medical center, hosted a two-day conference on managed care education to develop innovative instructional and evaluative approaches that, where appropriate, would bu...

We investigated naturally occurring feedback incidents to substantiate literature-based recommended techniques for giving feedback effectively. A faculty development course for improving the teaching of the medical interview, with opportunities for participants to receive feedback. Seventy-four course participants (clinician-educators from a wide r...

To identify strategies involved in the diagnosis and treatment plans of primary care problems that are uncertain and complex. In this exploratory study we observed primary care physicians encountering standardized patients who portrayed typical primary care problems involving uncertainty and complexity. First, we analyzed 10 tapes of nine physician...

It is not enough for clinicians to gather good patient information and then dictate management plans. If patient education is to be successful, attention must be paid to tailoring educational input to the patient's particular needs. If the conceptual change approach is followed, patient differences due to factors such as age and culture will be tak...

To observe and evaluate the performance of primary care internal medicine residents within the outpatient clinic milieu. Longitudinal descriptive study. 48 internal medicine resident encounters with two standardized patients at the University of Wisconsin General Internal Medicine Clinics. Residents were rated by the standardized patients with a me...

In order to improve clinical teaching in the ambulatory care setting, clinical teachers need to know the range of instructional strategies available to them. One potentially useful strategy is that of reflection. In this paper, reflective practice will be described in the context of the professional training of physicians, with the purpose of impro...

The increasing occurrence of outpatient medical care has led to the need for more and better medical education in the clinic. the Wisconsin Inventory of Clinic Teaching (WICT) was developed to improve the teaching of attending doctors in a general internal medicine clinic. The items on the inventory were derived from interviews with residents and a...

Ideas concerning reflection in general, the role of reflection in cognitive apprenticeship, and reflection in action are discussed. The notion of reflection in a particular setting is presented for two cases: the professional education and training of physicians, and a teaching improvement program in which a teacher-teacher coach facilitates the im...

An interview task to identify teachers' conceptions of teaching science was developed. Analysis of the task allows the identification of different components of the conception including the nature of science, learning, learner characteristics, rationale for instruction, preferred instructional techniques and their relationship to form a conception...

Examines knowledge, its origin, the factors affecting its growth, individual and group differences, and the implications of these ideas for the teaching of science. Describes a model of learning as a conceptual change which might reconcile competing instructional frameworks so that "western science" could be taught effectively in developing nations...

An analysis of recent science education research on student conceptions of natural phenomena, on science teaching and on science teacher planning carries implications for science teacher education. This suggests that the development of appropriate conceptions of teaching should be an important goal of science teacher education. Drawing the analogy...

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Conceptual conflict has long been recognized as a factor that could facilitate student learning. Due, however, to the lack of a convincing explanation of why it occurs, and how it can be resolved, it has seldom been used in instructional design. Its potential use in instruction is particularly relevant in the light of the recent, well-documented fi...

One of the factors affecting students' learning in science is their existing knowledge prior to instruction. The students' prior knowledge provides an indication of the alternative conceptions as well as the scientific conceptions possessed by the students. This study is concerned primarily with students' alternative conceptions and with instructio...

159 I nt er nat io na l Jo ur nal o f En v ir on me nt a l & Sc ie n ce E d uc a t i on Vo l. 3, N o. 3 , J ul y 2 0 0 8, x x-x x With the increased global awareness of the negative impact of scientific, technological and industrial activities on the environment and copious examples of sustainable prac-tices existing in many an indigenous community...