LEF Award Summary 2025

Neurophobia, the fear of neurology due to its perceived complexity, is a well-documented barrier in medical education. This challenge often persists into early clinical practice, where junior veterinarians report low confidence in neurology-related decision-making, potentially impacting patient care. To address this, our project will implement a structured, experiential learning strategy to foster engagement, reinforce key concepts, and build a sense of belonging. The DVM program’s unique cohort model, where students follow the same schedule throughout their four years of study, fosters strong community bonds. This initiative will leverage that community to create a repository of essential neurology facts and develop a ‘New Graduate Neuro Survival Guide’ to ease the transition from training to independent practice, thereby improving confidence, reducing neurophobia, and enhancing engagement. The project also contextualizes specialized knowledge acquired at a referral teaching hospital, making it relevant to day-to-day practice in general clinics and enhancing the meaningfulness of learning.

The 2020-21 CSAHS Enhancing Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Indigenization (EDII) Grant was used to embed Indigenous pedagogies into a second-year course, Society, Knowledge Systems and Environment, involving Indigenous educators in creating new teaching and learning tools. This LEF enables us to embark on a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) study to understand the impacts of focusing on Decolonization, Indigenization, and Reconciliation in this mid-sized social science course. In the study, we will analyze student engagement and the achievement of Indigenous learning outcomes through diverse content and methods. We seek to answer three guiding questions focusing on the wholistic transformative power of decolonial and Indigenous pedagogies, the strengths, challenges and unrealised potentials of these pedagogies, and the institutional supports needed for transformative Decolonization, Indigenization, and Reconciliation in classrooms. This project will have broad impact across campus as other instructors work toward integrating Indigenous learning outcomes in their own courses.