Kayaks frequently skim through our region’s waters, including the Lake Washington Ship Canal that runs through the UWSOP’s backyard. Kayaks were first built about 4,000 years ago for subarctic sea hunting and transport by the indigenous Inuit, Yup’ik and Aleut cultures, using wooden or whalebone frameworks covered with stretched animal skins (Wikipedia, 2016).
Like the construction of these ancient vessels, our curriculum must be connected to a framework of guiding values, tenets, and requirements towards the goal of achieving desired outcomes. Once we craft a strong and clear structure of our curricular goals and rationale, we can begin preparing and sewing together the detailed processes and content that will allow us to speed ahead.
After gathering a vast amount of data and information on curricular models, considerations, and details from faculty, students, practitioners, and other pharmacy schools across the nation, the Curricular Innovation Guidance Team began to blend key insights, best practices, and recurring ideas gleaned from all our activities into a preliminary framework applied to the UWSOP, in order to identify gaps, challenges, and additional questions. As we grouped similar concepts together, potential curricular values emerged, along with related outcomes and possible implementation approaches. Differences in approaches highlighted questions about “guiding tenets”—a shared mental understanding for what our curriculum needs—and criteria for evaluating how well a model fits to our standards, opportunities, and desired outcomes.
After we finish sanding out the rough edges in this preliminary framework, we will apply a possible curricular approach and model. Ultimately, our goal is to design a framework and curriculum that will not only float, but more importantly, sail.
Citations:
“Kayak.” Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. (2016, August 13). FL: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved August 19, 2016, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayak.