Community Engaged Teaching & Partnerships

The school of medicine regularly conducts community engagement activities that involve:

• Community-engaged learning and Partnership Pedagogy principles of co-design, co-delivery, co-assessment, and co-evaluation of teaching and learning with community partners which give community partners real voice and role.
• Social accountability: addressing issues that are relevant to the communities, which are co-identified during these engagements.

Theses community engagement activities provide mutual benefits for students, community partners, and the School of Medicine plus the University. They provide:

• Immersive learning: going out there to work and live in the communities; not merely relying on on-campus lectures and workshops.
• A lot of learning prompts to trigger students’ self-directed learning and reflections about the strengths and issues they see in the community.
• Pedagogical and community engagement approaches which have been proven to be effective. When we use a novel approach, we build the evidence base for it through robust co-evaluations with our community partners.
• Flexible and inclusive learning that is ready to be moulded into the needs and capacity of our myriad community partners.

Key engagement initiatives include:

Medicine in Context Program (MiC)

The School of medicine’s flagship community-engaged teaching & learning program since 2009, currently covering Years 1-2-3 of the curriculum with expansion to Years 4-5 still in the making. The program has engaged with around 200 community partner organisations all over NSW (mainly in Greater Western Sydney), even including the ACT at some points.

The program also carefully utilises scaffolded learning about social determinants of health; the role of community-based services in social care, health, and wellbeing; and the role of doctors in the bigger picture of health in the community. The (MiC) Program was the Winner of WSU Excellence in Community Engagement & Sustainability 2015 and WSU Excellence in Teaching Partnerships 2020.

Bathurst Clinical School

WSU provides one of two SoM Rural Clinical Schools with extensive connection with Councils, community groups, regional Aboriginal Medical Services, and rural high schools.

The clinical school brings medical students during rural placements into direct engagements with local communities in town, farms, and health checks and health education during events (e.g. Bathurst Car Races).

Partnerships with Aboriginal Medical Services

The embodiment of our 5-year fully integrated Indigenous Health curriculum. In 5-week immersive placements, all students (compulsory for all, including international students) spend time living in the rural Aboriginal community; listening to them; co-design and participate in the community projects; and learn what Indigenous Health is all about beyond lectures and on-campus workshops.

Initiatives like this give community and student representatives in many of our governance committees a seat at a table. We do the hard work together with our students and community partners, that enables us to celebrate our success together!

For further information on the great work the school of medicine does, check out our publications about the school’s community engaged teaching & learning in the sidebar.