A Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anatomy Education – Is it Needed?

Abstract

With an increasing demand for anatomy faculty members, a number of graduate programs have been implemented to train individuals to be able to teach the various anatomical disciplines. Such programs offer instruction in pedagogy, scholarly teaching and educational research. Although there are increasing numbers of masters and doctoral level programs that have emerged, anatomy education focused postdocs are nearly nonexistent. In this study, members of the American Association of Anatomists were surveyed to determine whether they perceived that a postdoctoral fellowship emphasizing educational research and pedagogy training in the anatomical sciences would be a worthy endeavor. Initially, a pilot survey was conducted, inviting 27 early to mid‐career anatomy faculty to participate. For the second administration of the survey, an open invitation was posted in a public forum on Anatomy Connected, a platform open to all AAA members. Follow‐up interviews were conducted with eight respondents from the pilot survey. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results, as well as thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that most individuals, regardless of their own completion of a postdoctoral fellowship, see value in a well‐designed anatomy education postdoctoral fellowship experience. Perceived potential benefits include mentorship to enhance their own pedagogy, gain additional teaching experiences, and development of educational research skills. There are concerns regarding the funding support for such a position, as well as the potential exploitation of an individual in such a position. Still, as a whole, the survey and interview results suggest that developing anatomy education postdoctoral fellowships have a strong potential to aid the development of our future anatomy educators and educational researchers, particularly for individuals earning doctorates from programs that do not offer explicit training in pedagogy and/or educational research.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.