Podcasting Call: Responding to Resident Educational Needs Through Dynamic Advocacy Curriculum

Background: Standardized methodologies for teaching advocacy have not been established. The Dell Medical School Pediatric residency program developed a three-year community health and advocacy curriculum that employs adult learning theory techniques in conjunction with Kolb’s experiential learning process in which learners use experiences to develop new ideas to apply them to their environment. For this curriculum, each year, learners choose an advocacy topic and a product to create as the foundation of the learning experience. We sought to evaluate this innovative approach to advocacy education qualitatively using traditional resident feedback collection and quantitatively by examining utilization of the advocacy product created.

Methods: A stakeholder group including residents and faculty was convened to develop a consensus list of advocacy topics and products using nominal group technique. For the 2020 academic year, pediatric residents chose to focus on the topic of structural racism in medicine and decided to create a podcast. The steps toward this goal consisted of three components: an independent learning module created by core faculty, a two hour preparatory workshop in which facilitators guided residents through a discussion on the chosen topic and helped the residents gather resources needed to create the podcast, and finally a two hour creation workshop during which residents recorded their podcast. Residents were divided into four groups for completion of the activities and each group chose a specific sub-topic within the overarching theme to focus on.

Results: The sub-topics included: speaking with families about race, the bystander effect, the art of listening, and health disparities. Under the guidance of faculty without any specific podcast production experience, residents produced four podcast episodes. Each episode contained a resident experience in story form, an expert interview, and a discussion of resources for pediatricians. Qualitative survey data assessed the impact of the experience and opportunities for improvement. Cumulative survey results indicated a perceived benefit of the project with improvement in knowledge, confidence, and ability to utilize resources. This project is an active work in progress and the quantitative portion of the evaluation will not be available until podcast is distributed (anticipated August 2021).

Conclusion: Community health and advocacy curriculum can include learner-driven product creation as a novel method of generating new knowledge on difficult topics like structural racism in medicine. Pediatric trainees can help guide topic selection, and facilitators can guide residents on product creation to address such topics. Incorporating multiple learning models with a thoughtful approach to tracking progress allows for a defined format that inspires creativity among learners. The podcast episodes produced with this project contain content that can be shared broadly. The model outlined can be used as a format for developing advocacy curriculum for pediatric residency programs.