It’s Friday 29 April, and our long-planned SC Workshop (SCW) is starting. It’s hosted by Angela Yenssen and myself. Angela is a Toronto lawyer, used to be my wonderful RA, and worked with me on many projects including SC projects at Osgoode. She’ll be chairing most sessions, and I’ll be liveblogging the sessions where I can – except the session I’m doing with Shelley Kierstead of Osgoode. Our slides are up on the SCW website here, along with those for other sessions. Lots of other SC goodies there too, including training docs, research and much else.
Our plenary is being given by Lorena Dobbie and Delon Pereira of the Standardized Patient Program at the University of Toronto, entitled From Theory to Practice: Expanding Simulated Patient Methodologies beyond Healthcare. The Standardized Patient Program (SPP), Temerty Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto has been a leader in the field of simulation and assessment. Lorena and Delon are giving insights into the development of simulation methodologies in healthcare education at SPP University of Toronto that are transferrable to other professions. They’re talking about their experiences with implementation of experiential learning including scope and scale of projects, pivoting to online learning and assessment, and collaborations with community-based programs as well as the introduction of simulation to the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.
One of their key points is the professionalization of simulation and how this has enabled diversification of practices, discourses, knowledge production and training methodologies within the field. They emphasised rigor of training in the implementation, particularly in the disciplines beyond healthcare. But they go beyond this, saying that relationships in training partnerships are critical, as is the depth of collaboration, and knowledge about the learner – their learning contexts, the affective resonances of a case. Entirely agree with this: SC use is built on interdisciplinarity.
They gave an interesting account of their project with U of T Faculty of Law. Listening to this, I learned a lot about the importance of granular relationship building – I’ve found that essential, too. Good questions from Noel Semple on the extent and detail of the UT project