Surgical Education: Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Research

Abstract

The chapter provides a view on surgical education from the perspective of an outsider with an interest in meaning and learning. It asks questions such as ‘How might learning in surgical education differ from learning in other areas?’ ‘What is the knowledge of surgery and how can it be represented as a curriculum in order to appear usefully in environments of learning?’ ‘How can a curriculum, which seems in large measure to be embodied, be transposed from sites of surgical practice to environments of surgical learning?’ ‘Is simulation essential in environments of learning of surgical practice and what might be the reasons for this?’ It sets such questions in a brief history of educational trends over the last three decades, and poses some questions that arise around distinctions between tacit and explicit forms of knowing. The chapter briefly touches on issues of assessment, and provides a brief sketch of some issues that might be part of a necessary agenda for research in this domain.