SYNOPSIS

The AFMC John Ruedy Award for Excellence In Graduate Health Professions Education Scholarship recognizes learners for their scholarly potential in health professions education (HPE). The recipient of the John Ruedy Award will present their innovative work to the ICAM audience at the John Ruedy symposium.

Academic underperformance and struggle are critical issues in undergraduate medical education. Three questions will be explored in this session: 1) What is academic struggle? 2) How is it experienced? and 3) What does it do? Using a phenomenological approach and concepts from philosophy, the presenter demonstrates how attending to the lived experience of struggling medical students can challenge our current understandings of remediation and improve the way learners are supported through their challenges.

At the end of this session, participants will:

1. Identify gaps within the research literature on academic struggle in medical education and evaluate the consequences of these gaps in knowledge;
2. Assess what insights a phenomenological study can bring to current understandings of academic struggle in medical education;
3. Recognize the susceptibility of struggling medical students to moral harms such as epistemic injustice.