Integrating general and professional education through a study of herbal products: An intercollegiate collaboration

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Spring 2000 by Zlatic, Thomas D, Nowak, Deanne M, Sylvester, Diane

Integrating General and Professional Education through a Study of Herbal Products: An Intercollegiate Collaboration1

To prepare students to practice pharmaceutical care, pharmacy schools must ground professional study within general education. Accordingly, an interdisciplinary faculty team from different pharmacy schools collaborated to integrate the teaching of general and professional abilities through a study of herbal products. St. Louis students in Critical Thinking and Writing and Albany students in Natural Products employed inexpensive electronic technology to collaborate on projects related to Internet advertising of herbals; the purpose was to improve their thinking, communication, and ethical decision-making abilities within a context of professional study. Using an ability-outcomes approach, the instructors identified what students needed to do; employed strategies that required practice of abilities in a sequence of increasingly complex assignments; created criteria to guide practice; and provided extensive feedback. Portfolios, surveys, testing, and course evaluations indicate students improved the targeted abilities. The collaboration broadened student perspectives and enabled them to practice general and professional abilities within contemporary, relevant contexts.

General education is to be had, I am saying, anywhere in the college curriculum, whether the discipline in question is traditionally liberal or frankly professional-as long as the instructor plans carefully not just the substantive information she is imparting, but the qualities of complex reasoning, and the subtle contexts of culture and value, that she is also presenting.

Linda Salamon, 1985

In 1985, when Linda Salamon, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, spoke these words at an AACP General Session in San Francisco, there was a flurry of activity to establish what the Association of American Colleges (AAC) called "integrity in the college curriculum," with "integrity" referring to "wholeness."(1) Salamon specifically urged this integrity or wholeness for the pharmacy curriculum, a healing of the bifurcation of liberal and professional studies. This theme is echoed in the Report of the Professional Preparation Network, Strengthening the Ties that Bind: Integrating Undergraduate Liberal and Professional Study(2), which proposed common ability outcomes for professional and liberal education. And The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action recommended a science pedagogy that emphasized not simply mastery of content but educational experiences that clarified: (i) the nature of scientific understanding; (ai) integrative concepts such as scale and proportion or change and evolution; and (iii) the historical, ethical, social, economic, and political contexts of science(3).

The idea that professional education should be situated within general education is not an end-of the-millenium fad. It goes back to at least 1868 when Edward Parrish argued:

The very first thing after good moral principle in a young man is a liberal education. When we start to improve our profession, let us begin by insisting on a better preliminary education, the basis not only of success in pharmaceutical education, but the basis for success in life.(4)

And the exhortations continue through the 1999 address of AACP President-Elect Robert E. Smith, who charged the Academic Affairs Committee to "suggest ways to strengthen the academy's support for their [the general outcomes and abilities'] incorporation into our pharmacy curricula."(5)

Implicit in these several recommendations is the recognition that what distinguishes education from training, a profession from a trade, is, partly, inquiry, analysis, judgment, and ethical decision-making-all of which are sometimes subsumed under the rubric of "critical thinking." What is more modern perhaps is the proposition that general education should not be antecedent to or concurrent with professional education, but integrated into it.

Over the past fifteen years colleges of pharmacy have responded to the recommendations of educational associations such as AAC and AACP (particularly through its Commission to Implement Change in Pharmaceutical Education) and the Focus Group for Liberalization of the Professional Curriculum(6,7), to develop within professional education pedagogies that incorporate ability-based assessment, critical thinking, and active learning. But despite many groundbreaking efforts and remarkable and even inspirational successes across the country, it is questionable that this integration of professional and general education is the norm in most schools of pharmacy. In an era of mushrooming knowledge that threatens a tyranny of content, it is difficult to answer, in a re-assuring way, these questions asked by Salamon:

Do you teach students not facts but the power to establish facts, to bring them together as evidence, to probe the apparent results, to let imagination and even intuition play over them? Do you let students draw their own conclusions, including (on occasion) false ones? And in your professional studies, do you strengthen those critical and analytic powers and invite students to make their own syntheses? Or just to accept yours? Do you reveal to them how little we know about drug action? How often new discoveries prove our assumptions wrong?