Fourteen second-year students at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine participated in a PechaKucha event on July 19. These students shared first-hand experiences from their Discovery Learning course during this rapid-style, storytelling event in front of judges and a participating audience.
As part of Carle Illinois’ innovative, active-learning curriculum, the Discovery Learning course is a three-week elective course which provides students the opportunity to choose between clinical immersion, research immersion, or global studies opportunities.
“The goal of Discovery Learning is to provide the students with professional global and local experiences in the medical or engineering fields, while further growing their competencies in our college values: creativity, competence, compassion, and curiosity,” said Olivia Coiado, Carle Illinois assistant professor and Discovery Learning course director.
As a follow-up to the course, PechaKucha provides students the opportunity to share about their varied Discovery Learning experiences. The students were split into different rooms based on the three Discovery Learning categories. With only 20 slides and only 20 seconds per slide, students presented their experiences in front of two judges and an active audience who could vote on the presentations as well.
Students who participated in global studies learned the complexity of global events and globalization, while incorporating these findings into the medical and engineering fields. Students were exposed to medical situations that may not be common in the United States, learning to work alongside local physicians to provide patient care.
Students who chose clinical immersion identified a clinical specialty and worked at Carle Foundational Hospital to experience first-hand the lifestyle and day-to-day responsibilities of physicians.
The research immersion opportunity provided the students with multi-disciplinary research experiences in the medical or engineering fields. These experiences prepared the students for advance research method courses and writing research papers.
“In future Discovery Learning courses, we look to grow our global studies locations, branching beyond the current locations of Brazil, Ecuador and Sierra Leone, and increase the amount of local clinical and research immersion experiences at Carle and the University of Illinois,” said Coiado.
After the conclusion of the PechaKucha presentations, a winner was selected from each of the three course options for the best presentation. Lidija Barbaric won the category for clinical immersion, Phani Gaddipati for research immersion and Samantha Houser for global studies.
The Discovery Learning course was sponsored by the Center for Global Studies through support of the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI NRC program and the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies.