About

Conference

This meeting is designed to identify, highlight, and debate tensions in HPE. What are the “sticking points” that are holding back HPE from becoming even better? What are recurring issues over years and across borders?

Productive Struggle:
Exploring the role of discomfort in learning, teaching and assessment

#MedEd on the Edge 2025

In health professions education today, there is heightened attention on improving the learner experience. This includes ensuring that there exists a learning environment in which everyone thrives and is free from intimidation and is psychologically safe. The notion is that psychological safety is a pre-requisite for learning. Is there a risk however, that in attempting to make students feel safe, that we can deny the turbulence, intellectual discomfort and stretch that can generate productive learning? The 2025 MedEd on the Edge conference focuses on the notion of productive struggle, addressing the dynamic, and the sometime perhaps dialectical relationship, between psychological safety and intellectual discomfort (or cognitive disequilibrium). Through five thematic tracks, we explore the role of discomfort in learning, teaching and assessment in the context of health professions education.

In participating in this conference, we will guarantee you an experience of ‘optimal discomfort’. Researchers and practitioners will challenge us to consider the productive dosage of extension, vulnerability, and risk taking from the perspective of learners, teachers, regulators and the community. Together we will explore the relationship between discomfort and learning, and how we can optimally challenge learners to be part of a health workforce fit for an ever-changing world.

Tracks:
The Clinical Learning Environment
Assessment
Gen AI
Migration and a global workforce
Professionalism

Registration opens in November

Full program for 2025 to be announced shortly.

Who should attend?

Leaders who want to advance health professions education from all over the world, from any health profession, and at any stage of career (from students to retired). No formal leadership position is needed. If you want to influence HPE, you are welcome!

---

---