The course will address current controversies, established areas of research, and emerging ideas in Health Professions Education Research (HPER). The sessions will provide an overview of the wide range of disciplinary and substantive areas within HPER and will include analyses of the assumptions and presuppositions (about research, knowledge, education, and health professional practice) that underpin research in each of these areas (and the implications of those assumptions or presuppositions for limiting or strengthening that research).

Objectives: by the end of the course: 1) Learners will be able to describe a range of substantive and disciplinary areas of research within HPER. 2) Learners will be able to relate the controversies and advances in several of those areas to their own research program. 3) Learners will be able to identify and analyze the assumptions and presuppositions implicit in academic work (including their own).