Scholarship of Learning and teaching

Dr Claudia Diaz

B.Sc. (Hons I), PhD (Medicine), Cert IV T&A, GCLTHE

Claudia Diaz is a neuroscientist and anatomist with over 32 years experience teaching at six Australian Universities; University of Sydney, University of Newcastle, James Cook University, RMIT Univeristy, La Trobe University and Charles Sturt University as well as one online University OUM (Oceania University of Medicine). She has extensive experience teaching to most health professional programs including medicine, dentistry, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, podiatry, sports and exercise science, medical radiation science, biomedical and medical laboratory science, psychology, pharmacy, chiropractic, osteopathy and Chinese medicine. Dr Diaz was the Head of Anatomy and Pathology at JCU in Townsville where she supervised over 100 staff, including student tutors and prosectors in both Townsville and Cairns. She was also the Coordinator of the Human Body Donor Program in North Queensland where she successfully acquired over 100 body donations in the first five years due to her excellent relationship with the local community, where she gave many public talks to promote the program and her engagement with the press (newspapers, radio and television). This role required a great deal of empathy and compassion working with potential donors and donor families at time of death. She has a proven record of excellent academic leadership and management skills.

Claudia has extensive experience establishing and designing new subjects, courses and programs as well as reviewing, restructuring, re-designing, developing and delivering anatomy courses for both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Claudia is experienced in both face-to-face teaching in the anatomy laboratory and online distance teaching. Her teaching philosophy entails stimulating multidisciplinary first year students to learn Anatomy for life via innovative, pro-active, non-didactic approaches to improve engagement and learning outcomes. She passionately believes that she has a duty to provide a supportive environment that will not only develop their personal skills, and their capacity and desire to learn, but also develop their skills and confidence as independent thinkers, problem solvers and self-evaluators. As a traditionally trained human Anatomist, she has an outstanding record of pedagogical developments (scholarship) in Anatomy teaching and learning over the past 20 years and she aims to help students to learn anatomy using a deep rather than a superficial (memorizing) approach. She has great passion for teaching, striving to provide a nurturing and stimulating environment for students that will make learning both enjoyable and stimulating. She is a very enthusiastic teacher and by making Anatomy engaging, stimulating and fun, and by helping students to be pro-active learners she is laying the foundations for a new approach to learning Anatomy. Claudia has been very creative in promoting these approaches by organizing 17 anatomical body painting projects over the past 12 years. These projects take up to 24 hours to complete and are carried out by my student team: models, artists and photographers. This very creative and engaging approach was even appreciated by the Prime Minister Julia Gillard who visited the anatomy laboratory and ended up body painting herself.

Although trained as a developmental visual neuroscientist, Dr Diaz discovered a passion and affinity for medical education research in 2010 using anatomical education research to compliment the innovative learning and teaching approaches that she developed as an early academic. She has now established herself in the area of medical education research having presented her work at numerous National and International conferences. She was invited to write a Chapter in an international education book “Education in Anatomical Sciences” regarding her innovative teaching approaches, and has published this work in major medical education journals and is currently an invited reviewer for five medical education journals. Her innovative teaching approaches have had a significant impact on Anatomy teaching and learning and have received widespread publicity in Australia and around the world, in particular regarding anatomical body painting. This work has been published in The Australian, The Age and many local newspapers and television and radio, it has been reported in over 60 countries all around the world and extensively on social media. The body painting work has accrued almost half a million views on YouTube and RMIT University received over 80,000 Facebook views in one day after publishing the Anatomical Man project in 2013. Her research aims to improve student engagement, to change the historical views about how anatomy is taught and more recently to focus on online teaching with all related issues such as academic integrity.