A Tale of Two Approaches: Results from Integrating Medical Histology and Pathology
Authors: Pinder Karen , Eastwood Jennifer 
Published: June 2021

In response to recommendations for curricular reform, many medical and allied health professional programs have reorganized discipline‐based courses and reduced educational contact hours. As with other core foundational medical science faculty, histology educators are navigating this reduced time for didactic lecture and lab‐based teaching. The resulting challenges are driving the development and implementation of innovative approaches to provide effective histology teaching. One approach is to integrate histology with other disciplines to both optimize limited teaching hours and increase the clinical and functional relevance of medical microanatomy. In this presentation, we describe educational studies of two different approaches to integrating histology with pathology – one in a fully integrated two year basic/clinical sciences curriculum, and one in a spiral curriculum, in which the first year focuses on basic sciences and the second year focuses on clinical sciences.

The first presenter (Dr. Pinder) will share experiences from collaborations between foundational scientists and clinicians in the integration of histology and pathology. Part of a medical curriculum renewal project and now in its third iteration, this study occurs in a combined basic and clinical sciences curriculum in which histology and pathology are integrated with increasing complexity throughout years one and two. Methods include the development of integrated learning laboratories in which students first explore the normal histology of an organ and then compare and contrast it to changes in cellular morphologies and/or tissue architecture occurring in prototypical pathologies. Results include faculty experiences, student outcomes on formative integrated examinations, and educational research data from student learning surveys.

The second presenter will share results from an action research study developed to identify disciplinary differences in how histology (normal and abnormal) is approached, understood, described, and taught. The faculty members, a histologist (Dr. Eastwood) and pathologist (Dr. Selinfreund), then apply this knowledge to create “transitional” learning activities to help students understand the relationship between normal and abnormal histology and navigate different disciplinary ways of knowing characteristics of histology and pathology. Research methods include qualitative analysis of faculty written reflections, debrief sessions, and collaborative teaching sessions. Results include identification of disciplinary disconnects, such as what “symmetry” means, histology knowledge most critical to histopathology, such as recognizing hematopoietic cells, and effective “transitional” activities, such as pathology integrations during histology sessions and focused histology reviews during pathology sessions.

The experiences and outcomes discussed will demonstrate efficacious approaches for integrating foundational sciences and clinical disciplines and will be useful for medical science educators who are exploring or implementing interdisciplinary undergraduate medical education in different curricular settings.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.