Abstract: New information technologies have produced profound changes in education and society. All knowledge areas have been constantly reinvented, readjusted and recreated to fit the changing demands of professional practice. Education in the health professions has also followed this trend. It is now clear how students, the future educators, are involved in this transformation and have been vectors of these changes. In parallel, the new curricula for health professions courses presuppose the active participation of students in their own training and in the training of their peers. This new way of teaching, which privileges teamwork, peer learning, interdisciplinarity, and autonomy, stimulates and demands this leadership role from students. Active student participation in undergraduate educational activities has several benefits: it favors learning; interpersonal relationships; acquiring skills in communication, mentoring, leadership, research, and management and develops social accountability. Undergraduate students in the health professions, even at the earliest stages of their education, make their choices and direct their interest to the area of knowledge they desire in professional life. When this choice falls on a specific area of health, they find, at the undergraduate level, ways to begin to develop their knowledge and skills in clinical practice, surgery, pediatrics, laboratory research, public health and other areas, but find no support for training when they intend to be future teachers. In this context, the FELLOWS Project emerged, proposed and carried out by medical students, a blended learning teaching development project that aims to train and improve education skills for students of the health professions, herein presented as an experience report. In 2017 the project took place from April to October, in monthly nighttime meetings, and eventually on Saturdays. It was conducted by four medical students (coordinators), two supervising local teachers and had collaborators from other medical education institutions. In 2018 the educational activities were held exclusively by students/resident coordinators and supervising teachers through two immersion sessions (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), separated by a 4 month-period, during which an education project was prepared, created in groups of six students accompanied by a tutor and a coordinator. The activities of the FELLOWS Project follow the National Curriculum Guidelines for the Undergraduate Medical Course of 2001 and 2014, meet the demands of health education in Brazil and respect the desired profile of the professional graduate, with social accountability. It offers contact with and progressive skills of communication and competencies for teaching, using active teaching-learning methodologies, teamwork, the use of digital technologies, exercising oral and written communication and creativity for innovation. The FELLOWS Project implementation process has brought direct benefits to the organizers and participants and indirect benefits to the educational institutions to which they belong, as it involved knowledge production, student engagement and social accountability.
Developing social accountability in 1st-year medical students: A case study from the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, Durban, South Africa
