We’ve already chatted a little bit and found out that we both have a Missouri connection. That’s kind of interesting to see that we just missed each other at one institution by a year maybe, or maybe even just a few months. I don’t know. But it’s always fun to interact with other people who are doing the same sort of thing that you’re doing and find out that there’s lots we have in common.

(04:26):
One thing that we both have in common is a love for Anatomical Sciences Education, which is a journal that is all about teaching anatomy, but not just anatomy. It’s all the related topics and subjects around anatomy. Just before we talked, I did a quick search of the phrase “anatomy and physiology” on the journal’s website and came up with, I don’t know, like a hundred-and-something articles that have that as their main theme. But of course, there are many more articles that certainly apply to the Combined Anatomy and Physiology course, so we’re talking anatomy here, we’re talking anatomy and physiology, we’re talking about all those other kinds of subjects that overlap it. You are now the newly appointed editor-in-chief of Anatomical Sciences Education and you have some plans. First of all, what’s your view of Anatomical Sciences Education and what do you think might be going on as we move forward from here?

Jason Organ (05:31):
Thank you for the question, Kevin, and thank you for the invitation to come onto your podcast. I’ve listened to it several times, as I’m sure lots of your listeners do because I’m interested in helping my teaching improve. I’m always interested in getting better at what I do. It’s a craft and we only get better by practicing it and so I love to listen to your guest come on and talk about how they’re doing innovative things in teaching anatomy and physiology. While I don’t teach A&P, I have taught A&P in the past, and I recognize that the level of student that’s taking A&P is the level of student that we want to get the best information to because they’re going to become the students who continue to progress through the system and then ultimately will reach the level where I’m teaching, which is at the graduate and professional level.

(06:23):
You’re right, I got appointed recently January 1st to become the editor-in-chief of Anatomical Sciences Education, which is one of the three journals that’s published by the American Association for Anatomy, along with The Anatomical Record and Developmental Dynamics. ASE, which is what we call the journal for short, because Anatomical Sciences Education is a mouthful, ASE is our highest-ranked journal among those three. It is all because we have incredible authors and we have had incredible editors and editors-in-chief who have built the foundation for this journal. This is the 16th year of the journal, and it has reached an impact factor that gets it ranked as the third-rated journal in science education, which is quite impressive because it’s a very niche journal, or it has been traditionally.

(07:16):
Now, you pointed out that anatomy-and-physiology-related topics are all over the place, but undergraduate-level research is not as prevalent in the journal as professional and graduate-level education and that’s something that I’m hoping that we can change. My vision for the journal is to really expand what we mean by “anatomy education.” I do a lot of work that is public-education-related and it has not had a home in Anatomical Sciences Education, even though it is anatomy education for the public, and to me, that blows my mind because we are a journal that is read by the practitioners of our field who could be the ones out there doing public engagement, and yet there wasn’t a home.

(08:01):
Well, there is a home now because we want to expand what we mean by “anatomy education.” We want to include more research that’s go that’s occurring in our classrooms at the undergraduate level. I’d love to see high-school-level anatomy and physiology education innovations published in our journal as well. Public anatomy, public engagement will always have a home in the journal, and most specifically, the history of the anatomical sciences now have a really prevalent home in our journal, so I have been fortunate to put together an associate editor team of experts that will allow us to grow the journal in new directions while staying true to what has been the bread and butter of the journal, which is publishing high-impact research on educational innovations. I’m excited to see where this takes us. Who knows where it’s going to take us? That’s what is exciting about it.

Kevin Patton (08:57):
I got to tell you that I want to read about all those things you just mentioned, so I’m really glad to hear that because I mean, I’ve always enjoyed Anatomical Sciences Education. There’s always something when I read through the table of contents and I do that regularly. I didn’t for a long time, and then once I started doing it, I regretted all that time. I wasn’t doing it because there’s always at least one or two things that immediately pop out at me like, “I got to know about this. I got to see what they found out about this research topic that they’re looking at,” and so there’s that.

(09:35):
Then a lot of times, I’ll linger and look even further and things that at first glance didn’t seem to really connect too much with what I do all the time, you look into it a little bit more and say, “Oh, my gosh, I can use that. That’s something I might want to try.” Even though this is an article about a professional-level medical-school-based course or whatever, what they were doing is something that’s easily adaptable to my undergraduate courses, so there’s that.

(10:03):
But in your vision of going even beyond that and taking some of the things I already like because there have been some historical type things in there and so on, but to expand that, boy, that’s wonderful, ’cause that’s really interesting to me, and it’s something that my students find interesting because sometimes they get sort of a little bit tired of the subject that they came into the classroom for and they want the story to expand out a little bit, “Let’s hear some interesting background to this,” and so on. History is one of the things that we can use to do that, so I love that, too.

Jason Organ (10:37):
I completely agree with you. One of the things that drew me to that or to that aspect of the anatomical sciences was standing actually in front of a dissection table at Aushwitz, which is one of the concentration camps that exterminated millions of inmates, predominantly Jewish prisoners during World War II during the Holocaust. My family is Jewish, so I had a lot of family die in the Holocaust, and I took a trip there in 1994 as a high school junior to sort of tour some of the concentration camps and then learn a little bit more hands-on about the Holocaust.

(11:13):
When I was standing at Auschwitz, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but there is a picture that has been indelibly burned into my retinas, and that is this dissection table covered in memorial candles and placards memorializing folks who perished at Auschwitz. It was a dissection table that had been used to remove things like gold teeth from dead bodies, anything that could be valuable, and for experiments, and all sorts of things like that and anatomical research. There’s the whole history of the Pernkopf Atlas, and while that’s not directly tied to Auschwitz, the approach that was taken at Auschwitz is the same approach that allowed something like the Pernkopf Atlas to come into existence. That vision, that image will never leave my mind, and so I’ve always wanted to know more about that aspect of the anatomical sciences. I didn’t think I was going to become an anatomy professor by any stretch when I was standing there, but I have to think it influenced me in a very profound way to do what I do now.

(12:22):
We have the opportunity in the journal to talk about things that are really relevant for the way we teach anatomy and physiology at all levels. For example, if we’re talking about microscopic anatomy of the lung, we talk about epithelial tissues, we talk about what are called “Clara cells.” We’ve all used that term before. That’s not a foreign term to us, but it’s an eponym, meaning that it was named after someone, and it was named after Max Clara, who was a Nazi. He was a Nazi who did really profoundly evil things like dosing prisoners with vitamin C five days before they were to be executed without their knowledge that they were about to be executed so that he could measure the effects of vitamin C circulation and all sorts of other physiological experiments done on non-consenting prisoners and to use the term “Clara cell” is offensive for many, many reasons. We can call them “club cells.” That’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t have to be an eponym.

(13:35):
But also if we do that and we scrub that history, we lose an opportunity to talk about ethics, and so I am of the belief that we shouldn’t use the term, but we shouldn’t hide the term either. We should talk about club cells, but we should also say, “These are also known as ‘Clara cells.’ Let me tell you a little bit about Max Clara,” for example. There is all sorts of information about the eponyms that are all over the anatomical sciences. Not all of them are evil in the way that Max Clara was evil, but almost all of them are named after people who may not have been the one who actually identified the structure, and they’re always named after white men from Europe, and so there’s an opportunity to talk about the things that sort of sustain us as educators.

(14:30):
There’s only so many times you can teach the physiology of respiration in the same way without becoming bored to tears. When you start to become bored, your students definitely pick up on that, but if you can find something else to talk about, something that can re-energize you, like talking about the history of just one little aspect, a five-minute aside is all it takes 10 minutes, whatever, they find it’s a way for you to reinvigorate your own sort of teaching, and to me, that’s why I’ve always been interested in finding that next piece of information, this nugget of information that I have an obligation to talk about with someone. That to me is what drives me and so I’m excited that that’s going to be a big part of our journal moving forward because there’s a lot to unpack in the history of our discipline and we’ve only just started.

Kevin Patton (15:23):
Well, and no matter where we are in our career, it’s very unlikely that we will have had anything in our own training that would’ve prepared us for those kind of stories, so we need a source for learning about those stories because it’s not going to be, at least very often, going to be in mainstream media where we pick up on that stuff. I mean, even sources for historical information like History Channel-type stuff, or the Smithsonian Magazine, or something like that, some of those stories appear there, but to have a source really directed at what we’re doing and the kind of scientific stories we’re telling in class, to have these historical and cultural stories that we can bring in, I think it’s a great resource.

(16:09):
I don’t know, even if I didn’t use it in my class, that reinvigorates my interest in what’s going on. I always find it’s good to have those stories sort of there in your pocket ready to use because maybe you didn’t plan on telling that story, but just in the context of what you’re discussing with your students, it just makes sense that, “Oh yeah, let’s talk about Max Clara,” so yeah, I’m really glad to hear that that’s, we’re going to be seeing more of that in the journal. We’ll come back to our discussion with Jason Organ after this short break.

Sponsored by HAPI

(16:46):
The free distribution of this podcast is sponsored by the Master of Science and Human Anatomy and Physiology Instruction, the HAPI degree. I’m on the faculty of this online graduate program at Northeast College of Health Sciences where our learners review science concepts and explore evidence-based strategies to teach those concepts. Check out the HAPI program at northeastcollege.edu/hapi, that’s H-A-P-I, or click the link in the show notes or episode page.

Humanity in Teaching Human A&P

(17:24):
Our guest, Jason Organ, and I were talking about the history of anatomy and how that not only intersects with the concepts and terminology of our course, but also offers opportunities for discussing ethics and other topics. I just had a discussion with some people who are preparing to teach anatomy and physiology at the college level, and there was a discussion about whether you should bring in things other than the subject itself. We see a lot of those questions just in the wider culture right now across the globe, not just in the United States, but everywhere where there are some people saying, “No, you stick to your subject. You don’t talk about these things. That doesn’t belong in your course.” When you talk about history, for example, or cultural events or cultural movements like Nazism and the effects it had, it had an effect on anatomy science and anatomy education, and there are appropriate places to bring stories like you just told into the course. But there are some people who may or may not be against that particular story, but they’re against the idea of bringing this in.

(18:36):
But so much of the wider educational literature has confirmed that the more connection you make right between disciplines, the deeper the learning and the more the students are going to remember it and the better able they’re going to be to apply it to things. I don’t know. This is all selfish. I want my healthcare professionals to come out of their training with some humanity that has been nurtured through their training and not ignored and so I think that those stories help and because we’re weaving in the humanities basically by telling those stories, then we can do that.

Jason Organ (19:18):
I completely agree. We’ve been doing all sorts of work in that arena over the last several years here at Indiana University because we have the fortune, some might call it a misfortune, but I will call it a fortune of having nearly every type of collegiate level or above learner population represented on our campus. We have medical students, we have dental students, and we have all sorts of allied health profession students, and we have undergraduates and graduates and post-back students, and we get an opportunity to teach them all. We bring high schoolers in for lab tours. We get an opportunity to teach everyone.

(19:54):
That’s awesome, but that also means that we are not strictly tied to licensing requirements for curricula in many ways, so yeah, our medical curriculum has to have a very specific design to it that’s going to meet licensing needs of graduates, and our allied health professions students have certain competencies that they must master in order to practice their professions. But when we get to the other learner populations, we can teach the anatomy in combination with other things, and so we’ve taken our graduate and undergraduate-level courses and turn them into basically arenas to understand empathy.

Kevin Patton (20:34):
Wow.

Jason Organ (20:35):
We do all sorts of activities around anatomy that are not specifically about gross anatomy. We offer them an opportunity to earn additional credit for the course toward their final grade in the course by writing reflections about the donors in the lab and what it was like the first day they were in lab, or what the quality of life of that individual might have been based on all of the things that they’ve observed about their donor while they’ve moved to a different section.

Kevin Patton (21:07):
Wow.

Jason Organ (21:07):
Or watching historical lectures about a various aspects of anatomy and writing a reflection about how that fits into their contemporary understanding of the anatomical sciences and how they feel about the work that they’re doing in the lab. We are of the same mind. I want my healthcare practitioners to be people first and then practitioners second. I want them to have the skillset to do their job, but the biggest skill they need in that skillset is how to communicate with another person on a level that can actually make some meaning between the two of them. A lot of times, we don’t have that opportunity to either train our practitioners to get better at doing that, or as a patient, to even have an opportunity to talk with our providers because of the way that the American healthcare system is set up.

Kevin Patton (22:00):
Wow. This is one of those moments when I think, “Oh, man, if I had the opportunity to start all over, I’m going to be in your program.” That is not at all… I was very fortunate to have some professors that really did that sort of thing with some of their courses, so I can’t say I didn’t have any of that, but that does seem to be a direction that in general, a lot of people are moving in, and your program sounds awesome where you’re very intentional about doing that. I’m looking forward to in ASE to be seeing more kinds of articles that are addressing that and helping people like me incorporate it in small ways and large ways, this drive toward empathy that you were talking about, or this nurturing of empathy maybe is a better way to put it.

(22:57):
Another thing that I happen to notice, because I opened up the ASE website just before we started recording just to see what’s new, and of course, there’s a couple of things that are just a day old on there, so I had not seen them before. I mean, some of these things are very current and important things. It kind of overlaps what you were just talking about in terms of the humanity of it and the empathy and so on. For example, there’s an article up there about female genitals and sort of the history behind how we teach that and how we can be a lot more diverse and inclusive in our approach to that and why we should do that. That’s a movement that is really gaining some traction, has gained traction over the last few years, and I’m hoping will continue to, I hope we don’t get tired of it, or burned out on it, because there’s a lot more work to do, but that is something I just saw in the journal.

(24:04):
Then there’s things that we tackle as educators, too, that are new to us, and like, “Well, how do we deal with this?” Like ChatGPT.

Jason Organ (24:15):
Sure.

Kevin Patton (24:15):
It was only a few weeks ago that it suddenly became a focus of conversation among everybody you want to talk to even outside education in that, and so here’s already an article addressing that in the journal. We have all these contemporary things going on in education, this movement toward more inclusion, better inclusion in our courses, and in our curriculum and also dealing with advances in educational technology and how that impacts our teaching and our assessment and so on.

Jason Organ (24:54):
Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up… First of all, I’m glad you brought up all of this because our bread and butter at the journal for a long time has been evaluating the effectiveness of pedagogical innovation and intervention. We still will stay true to that because that’s where folks can go to learn about evaluated interventions that have some evidence base to them and they’re shown to be effective at communicating a particular learning objective or a particular approach, and so we will continue to publish those, but we have to remain relevant to the ever-changing world of academia and the ever-changing world that we live in, anyway, because of technology.

(25:37):
I’m excited that we are publishing viewpoints on appropriate ways to address external genitalia with students who don’t identify as one of a binary gender or a binary sex because we want to be as inclusive as possible and I think it’s fantastic because we’ve seen papers that are published about how we should think about talking about these things or think about it, but we haven’t seen a lot of the, “This is now how you talk about this with your students,” and that’s the next phase. That’s going to be the exciting application of the new communication strategies that we should all be employing as we think about an ever-changing world, so I’m excited about that.

(26:24):
I’m also really excited about the artificial intelligence aspect of the journal, but I can’t take any credit for this at all. Bruce Wainman, I’m sorry, at McMaster University is putting together a special issue on artificial intelligence, and even though ChatGPT didn’t arrive on the scene until late into this special issue, it’s going to have a home with these other papers, too, and so we’re excited that this year we will be publishing a special issue of the journal on artificial intelligence.

Kevin Patton (26:54):
Wow.

Jason Organ (26:55):
It just so happens it’s right there in the public’s mind because of ChatGPT, but it’s been around for long enough that we actually have some interesting data about how to use it and apply it in the anatomical sciences realm, and so it’s pretty cool.

Kevin Patton (27:10):
Wow. Yeah, I want to read that now, so I’m looking forward to that. Do you have a target date for that or …?

Jason Organ (27:20):
I don’t. It’s kind of a fluid situation because there’s so many interesting manuscripts are coming in now about ChatGPT and related AI and so we have to figure out where to strike the balance between getting things published in a special issue because it’s timely versus continuing to hold it open so we can get even more timely information in. The one benefit of waiting is that the moment a paper is accepted at the journal, it actually gets put up onto the website even before it gets copyedited and all that, so you can read it in real-time, and so we’re not going to be holding back information from any reader, it’s just whether we’re going to package it together. We only publish six issues a year currently. That I’m hoping will change over the next several years. We are just about to publish our second issue of the year, so we have four remaining in 2023, and I’m hoping that this special issue makes it in sooner rather than later.

Kevin Patton (28:20):
After this next sponsor break, we’ll pick up our chat with Dr. Jason Organ.

Sponsored by HAPS

(28:28):
Marketing support for this podcast is provided by HAPS, the Human Anatomy & Physiology Society, host of the upcoming annual HAPS Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico this May. I’m planning to be there, so come and find me to say hi when you get there. You can get more details and register at theAPprofessor.org/haps, that’s H-A-P-S.

Who Reads ASE?

(28:58):
Before the break, Jason Organ, the new editor-in-chief of Anatomical Sciences Education, or ASE for short, was talking about special issues and early online access to newly accepted articles before they’re published in the journal. I’m glad you brought up the idea that there are these early availability of things that will eventually get into an official issue of the journal because that is something that I think anybody listening to this podcast is going to want to know about.

(29:30):
We’ve already alluded to this several times, but I just want to circle back to it and emphasize it just based on my own experience, but I know others that this has happened with, I’ve had this conversation with people who teach A&P, and that is that a journal like ASE is one that, I don’t know, early in my career… Well, actually when it first came out, I was already teaching when it was first published, and I thought, “Well, this is for people who are doing research in teaching and learning. They’re doing education research and I don’t do that.” I mean, I’ve dabbled in it a little bit, but that’s not my main thing I do. I have other things that I focus on, and so I thought, “Well, this isn’t really for me because it’s really for other people who are doing this research so that they can share ideas and leverage each other’s ideas and make progress in all this.” I just thought it was peripherally helpful to me.

(30:35):
I think in talking with as many and messaging and emailing and so on, as many A&P teachers across the world that I do, and there are a lot, I have a lot of conversations with a lot of people, a lot of them just don’t see that, “Hey, I’m just an A&P teacher. I’m here in a high school, in a community college, in state school,” whatever, “I’m just teaching undergraduates and I don’t do research in this area. I’m already busy doing other stuff. I don’t need to look at this journal.” But as you have pointed out several times, and with this artificial intelligence thing, this is on our minds as teachers. We’re going to want to read that special issue. I mean, it sounds like that’s something that you as editor-in-chief of ASE that you’re conscious of that, that you’re aware of that readership, and sounds to mean you’re inviting those readers to come in and take a look and that there will be something there for them.

Jason Organ (31:38):
Absolutely, because I’m part of that same group, truth be told. I’ve only published a few times in ASE. I actually was quite surprised that I was the ultimate selection as editor-in-chief because I am sort of the consummate consumer of the information in ASE, but I’m not a producer of the information in ASE. But what I do have expertise in is communication strategies for scientific and complex information. I have built my scholarship of teaching and learning around research related to how we more effectively communicate to the general public, and so while I haven’t done some of the classroom intervention work that we see in ASE’s pages, I read it all the time because that’s still the majority of what I do is teaching.

(32:31):
I want to get better at it and I want to use evidence-based approaches to teaching because at least at the level that I teach, I feel an obligation because of the amount of money that a student is paying out of pocket usually to learn in my classroom, and I want to make sure that the learning environment is best suited to meet the needs of all of the learners in that room and not just some of the learners in that room, and so I read the pages of ASE to find out how I can do that.

(33:00):
I hope that others will do the same because I’ve learned so much about how to be a better teacher by reading about what others have done that have worked really well or what have failed spectacularly. That’s the beauty of this kind of approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning is that I don’t have to be the one that produces it to be able to apply it, but I can also produce some stuff that maybe others don’t know how to or don’t want to produce, but would benefit from applying as well.

Kevin Patton (33:28):
Yeah, I’ve known a few A&P instructors who had no interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Then they start reading articles in ASE and elsewhere and thought, “I can do something like that. Here’s a question I have based on this. Why don’t I investigate that?” It could spark some divergence of careers a little bit and some other things that we can do to maintain our excitement about the whole idea of teaching anatomy and physiology.

Jason Organ (34:03):
Mm-hmm. I completely agree.

Kevin Patton (34:04):
Jason, I would be happy to talk with you all morning about this and other things, but we have limited time, so I really appreciate the fact that you came on this podcast and you talk about ASE. I just want to underscore for you, the listener, that this is one of the many resources from the American Association for Anatomy, which is a sponsor of this podcast, and you can go to anatomy.org to find out more about membership. I know many listeners are also members of HAPS, so if you’re not a member of AAA, American Association for Anatomy, if you’re already a member of HAPS, there’s a special membership, a deeply discounted membership rate at anatomy.org where you can join and get this journal and have access to this journal for not too big of an investment. Of course, it’s also available through your institution’s library and other places as well.

(35:04):
This is an excellent resource. I’ve talked about it a number of times. I’ve mentioned it briefly a number of times in past episodes of the podcast, and now we had the opportunity to listen to our brand new editor-in-chief of ASE, and now you hopefully are even more excited about keeping up with the journal and seeing what’s coming out, and if nothing else, looking forward to that artificial intelligence journal to see what other people plan on doing with it in their courses.

Jason Organ (35:35):
Thank you so much, Kevin. It’s really been a pleasure to talk with you. I’m happy to chat anytime.

Staying Connected

Kevin Patton (35:42):
In this episode, episode 134, I chatted with Dr. Jason Organ, the new editor-in-chief of ASE, Anatomical Sciences Education. He told us about his vision for the coming evolution of the journal, which includes building on the strong foundation and current strengths of ASE while at the same time reflecting contemporary issues in teaching and learning anatomy and physiology, supporting interdisciplinary aspects that address the humanity and empathy of our students, and offering even more support across the very wide spectrum of A&P teaching, including public education. As you might expect, I have links to ASE in the show notes. If you don’t see those links in your podcast player, go to the show notes at the episode page at theAPprofessor.org/134. While you’re there, you can claim your digital credential for listening to this episode. Do you have a reaction to our chat? Or maybe some questions or perhaps a favorite or thought-provoking ASE article to share? Why not call us at the podcast hotline? That’s 1-833-LION-DEN, which is 1-833-546-6336, or send a recording or written message to podcast@theAPprofessor.org. I’ll see you down the road.

Aileen Park (37:27):
The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, an award-winning professor and textbook author in human anatomy and physiology.

Kevin Patton (37:38):
The editorial board of this podcast accepts no liability whatsoever for the consequences of any inaccurate or misleading data, information, opinion, or statement.