ISRRT_COVID-19_book

y chance. The technology depicted on the marketing materials was somewhat off-putting as
I’d failed physics at school and it all looked a little too technical but the images of anatomy
were interesting enough to persuade me to take a chance.
So in 1980 I started my career as a radiographer. In my first week as a student, I was rostered
into ‘the library’ – where students were expected to undertake self-directed work, not easy
when you’re in your first week and you don’t know what you don’t know. Thus, whilst my
peers were taking their first x-rays, I did what I enjoyed most. I retrieved a Gray’s Anatomy
from the shelf and made a drawing of the heart. I was having a jolly good time when the
principal came into the library and asked me in a rather disparaging way whether I really
thought drawing was a good way to learn anatomy.
Unfortunately, the Principal, Mr Naylor, passed away a few years back, but I’d love to sit down
with him now and discuss that question over a pint of beer. As a radiography lecturer I have
studied how people learn and even gained a doctorate in education so I think I’d be able to
present Mr Naylor with a strong evidence- and experience-based argument for the value of
student-centred learning. Tapping into a learner’s emotion and joy is much more likely to help
them make sense of a set of facts than rote-learning 1-10
Nevertheless, shame-faced, I consigned my coloured pencils to the bottom of my bag, got out
my pen and started to write about the relations of the heart so that I might regurgitate these
facts in the exam. Don’t ask me to do that now although, unsurprisingly, I could draw you a
diagram (fig 2)!
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