Camosun Story #58: The Interdisciplinary Education Festival

Lynelle is a faculty member in the School Health and Human Services (HHS), in the Allied Health Technologies Department.  Since 2017, Lynelle has been a facilitator of the Interdisciplinary Education (IDE) Student Festival at Camosun College, and I wanted to talk to her about how the festival started, how it has evolved over the years, and where it is headed in the future. 

Lynelle started our conversation by sharing that the predecessor of the IDE festival originated out of a program review of the Medical Radiography program.  “One of the competencies being added by the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists (CAMRT) was around inter-professional communication.  The hope behind this competency was that if students are taught how to communicate inter-professionally at school, that skill will carry forward into their careers and ultimately improve patient-client outcomes because when practitioners communicate better, they can provide better coordinated collaborative care.”  Thus, a project-based course in interprofessional communication was born. 

The newly created course was MRAD 264, and Lynelle spoke passionately about its interdisciplinary nature. “Interdisciplinary education is about learning with, from, and about others – it’s peer-to-peer learning, and students were tasked with teaching other students about their profession and providing an integrated learning experience.”  In other words, students were not only working together within the course itself, but also required to communicate with students outside of the course.   “Students came up with the idea to run a mini conference on campus. They split into groups, and we ran four learning activities, inviting fellow Camosun students to come in and learn about our professions and about some of the unique challenges that we face, creating a moment in time where they could inter-professionally communicate.”  Students did not just run the conference itself, however.  They had to plan and market the event, ran a post-event pizza party (meaning they needed to get food safe certificates and organize food services), solicited donations, booked space for the event, etc.  The collaboration students engaged in went well beyond the course outcomes. 

Lynelle emphasized that every element of that conference was student produced, while she supported them to bring their vision alive.  “It was hard for the students because they wanted to be told what to do, and how they were going to be graded.  We spent a lot of time talking about how to accomplish a shared goal, how to organize their labour, how to ensure everybody understands their individual roles, etc.” 

The Dean of HHS and other college leadership attended that first mini-conference, and excitement grew.  Lynelle and others applied for and were awarded one of the Camosun Innovation Awards which gave them some budget to work with for the next year so students would not have to look for donations.  “The second year, we had enough money to do better promotion and to support participation from more students. That year, we went with poster-style presentations which are very common in health care learning.”  Then the following year they applied for another grant from outside of Camosun, and with that funding were able to build out the event even further.  During this time as well, students from more HHS programs were beginning to participate in the event. 

In 2019, although they didn’t know it at the time, they held the last fully in-person event.  “We had almost all of the health programs participating by that time and had to book off two floors of the Ewing building. We had both poster presentations and interactive displays as well as health and wellness activities – all student-led activities for the benefit of other students. We added a passport that listed all of the activities and each time you participated in one of them, you got a stamp. Students were then able to take that passport back to their instructors for bonus points or as part of a required activity in their courses.”  

But then, in 2020, COVID threw a wrench in the works when the college shut down shortly before the festival was to take place.  Because they couldn’t hold an in-person event they “pivoted in a dramatic way to a WordPress site where we posted all the presentation materials for students to interact with online.”  Lynelle reflected that, despite the stress, “ultimately that activity was quite successful and recording all of the work that we had intended to do under the circumstances was brilliant.” 

According to Lynelle, the level of engagement in this pandemic IDE was superficial, through comments on the site. But the next year, they took the online format and built on it.  “The following year we added another group of students to the mix – students in the Interactive Media Development (IMD)program in Computer Science which had been created by an interdisciplinary team at the College.  The purpose of bringing in the inter-professional practices course arose from an industry criticism of graduates from these types of highly technical programs that graduates struggle to communicate with clients.  We asked ourselves, I wonder what would happen if we put these IMD students in a situation where they had to learn with, from, and about students in a very dissimilar discipline: health.”  This was tactical as well, Lynelle noted, because health students tend to have lower technical expertise, although they are asked to work with electronic health records, digital imaging, app tracking, online health appointments. “Health students in general need to understand how technology works and how to communicate with the people who are building, maintaining, supporting technology in our workplaces.” Hence the decision to bring these two groups together. 

Lynelle didn’t teach the first IMD course, but she did the following year.  But because of low enrolments in that second pandemic year, they took the two cohorts of students (one from health and one from IMD) and combined them together into one section, a rare event with two cohorts of students in two separate Schools taking the same course.  It was a tough year, Lynelle said.  “We were all having a hard time with the pandemic, so what we did that year was refine the virtual-only experience. The first cohort of IMD students had built a brand-new website from scratch, collaborating with the health students and instructors; this section of combined students didn’t have the same capacity and we had to discover together what was possible.” And her additional challenge was teaching to two completely different groups of students.  “When you teach this particular course to a specific discipline, you work within that discipline’s perspective. But teaching from two perspectives is an interesting challenge. It was difficult for the students to grasp initially, but we walked through the steps and processes, convincing them of their own capabilities, and at about week eight or nine they started to see what was possible, and by week 13, they were pretty darn proud of themselves for what they had accomplished.” 

During this iteration, the virtual festival integrated more interactive elements into the website. In addition to the projects, the students included more information about different programs, they interviewed Dean of HHS about interdisciplinary education at Camosun and included some keynote speakers. The focus of the IMD students was peer-to-peer technical support for instructors and for students submitting projects to the website as well as providing troubleshooting support and updating the website.” And along the way, learning skills their profession had been criticized for lacking.  Lynelle was proud to report that the whole cohort of IMD students was immediately employed after graduation, and most were hired where they wanted to be hired. 

And now we come to the current year (2023).  “This semester, I’m teaching the course to Sonography students for the first time. And this year, the students are using H5P to develop an interactive virtual simulation that teaches their profession to people in other health care professions. The theme of this year’s interdisciplinary student festival, which will be held in the spring, is What we wish our colleagues knew: Get the scoop on our scope.”  Basically, students are looking at improving communication between professions, for example between nurses, care aids and allied health professionals, to reduce medical mistakes or miscommunications.  “The students created a simulation exercise: you click through it, learning bits here and there, watch some patient interactions, so at the end their peer colleagues should have a fundamental understanding of what sonographers need in order to do their job. And that’s the point of this student interdisciplinary festival – improving interprofessional communication.” 

As Lynelle and the IDE festival group think about the future, they are reaching out to the interdisciplinary education community of practice at Camosun College to see if there are ways to bring more students in to this kind of student-led learning for and about each other. “We’ve proven that it works with a group of students in a computer science program that realistically have no reason to take a health program, but this course does speak to one of their program outcomes explicitly.” To start, a student in Mental Health and Addictions has been interviewed by Lynelle’s students as a first step in learning about that profession, in hopes that “they will then be interested in learning more about us. Then maybe in the next iteration, they’ll be more interested in learning with us.” 

But it’s not just service-education programs Lynelle sees fitting in with the current model. “I want to learn how someone in Economics might see their students participating. When I think about how important economics is to funding our healthcare system, if economics students gained a better understanding of where they might fit in the world through collaborative learning and understanding, how would that improve our society? Because if we understand each other better, if we recognize not only what makes us different but what makes us the same, and what we need in order to work in a more collaborative way, I don’t think discipline matters so much – it’s about beginning to have those conversations.” 

And why shouldn’t anyone at Camosun be allowed and encouraged, and even required, to take an interdisciplinary communication course? “I would love for any student to be able to take this course and be able to participate in these kinds of activities – even to go so far as to create open programming where students could choose to take the courses that they’re excited to take.” Lynelle’s point hit home with me.  This course addresses an essential skill that ALL students should be engaged in learning.  “These are the skills employers are looking for – working with teams, working with clients – capabilities aren’t necessarily included in discipline-specific programs. Everyone who learns to take an X-ray can functionally execute an X-ray, but who can do it with the best client-centred care perspective? Who can interact with other colleagues in the department or interact with the other departments that we have to work with.?  This is why the IDE festival was born.” 

Lynelle concluded our conversation by telling me “I don’t know where this is going to go, but almost every single allied health, nursing, and health-related credential now includes some sort of inter-professional or interdisciplinary competency, so I think it’s here to stay in all those programs. But what about other essential courses? I would love to see, for example, a course about Indigenous history in every single program.  If we’re talking about the skills and capabilities that are going to help graduates function better as employees and be more attractive to employers, we have to look ways to incorporate those important topics and skills into the core of all our programs, so they are not something that students or instructors have to do off the side of their desk.”  That should be the future of education – whole and inclusive.