Wulling Center groups foster educational scholarship ‘by faculty, for faculty’

Kate Smith (left), Jungeun Lee (center), and Whitney Maxwell (right) receiving the 2024 AACP Innovations in Continuing Professional Development Award for a paper reviewed by the Wulling Center's journal club.

In 2013, College of Pharmacy faculty founded the Wulling Center for Innovation & Scholarship in Pharmacy Education to support scholarship aimed at advancing education. Since then, Dr. Kristin Janke, director of the center, has created several initiatives to further foster a supportive environment for this scholarship. 

The weekly education journal club, which formed around ten years ago, convenes members to read about cutting edge education and discuss the evidence supporting it. The #RxWritingChallenge initiative, on the other hand, focuses on supporting scholarly writing and involves over 1,900 participants across 51 countries twice per year. Most recently, she started EdScholars, a group that specifically originated out of curiosity around MNspire, the college’s new PharmD curriculum, in which members gather to learn about methods, review colleagues’ work before submission, host guest speakers, and discuss the innovative elements of the curriculum. 

“[The groups] came from listening carefully about what faculty, graduate students and residents needed. In our busy academic lives, it's really hard to read and it's really hard to write, so then it becomes difficult to get educational innovations published and have it be impactful for others,” Janke said. “A lot of the initiatives have been around [reading and writing], as well as building our methods capacity and the different strategies that we're using to collect, analyze, and present data related to student learning and teaching.”

These scholarly groups, in many ways, function as “sounding boards for ideas,” Janke said. The center as a whole has helped faculty evolve into educational researchers and achieve promotions. Over the past decade at the center, people have had ideas for projects that the groups help frame and bring “to fruition,” allowing members new to educational scholarship to develop their skill sets and lead their own projects, she noted.  

“We have all kinds of blind spots when we write…So we can have critical friends, so to speak, that see the work relatively early on… and give us feedback before we submit it to a journal,” Janke explained. “We hear that papers that have been through a pre-submission review go much, much more smoothly [through the publishing process].”

Another aspect that members appreciate is the student participation. Residents and graduate students bring their work to center meetings and PharmD students interested in academia sit in, providing feedback and student perspectives on the curriculum and educational research, Janke said. 

Jungeun "Cindy" Lee, a Social and Administrative Pharmacy (SAPh) graduate student, is a member of all three initiatives— journal club, #RxWritingChallenge, and EdScholars— which she said has impacted her academic career “immensely.” Lee said the discussions that come out of the reading in journal club have broadened her mind and aided her communication skills, while #RxWritingChallenge has helped sharpen her writing skill set. In particular, she said presenting her dissertation proposal to the journal club and EdScholars group offered her an opportunity to not only practice presenting, but hone her study and receive constructive feedback, which has been “instrumental in [her] development.” 

“My experience as a member has been enriching… It is invigorating being a part of a community of scholars who share my interest in educational scholarship. It further ignites my motivation to continue to dig deeper into this field,” Lee said. “My involvement with the Wulling Center has shown me the power of a supportive academic community. The collaborative environment showed me a model of engagement and support that I hope to instill and help create as I move forward in my academic career.”

The value of these groups is acknowledged by more than the college’s internal community. Dr. Kate Smith, an alumnus of the college’s PharmD program and current faculty at the University of Iowa, stayed in touch with Janke after graduation and joined the #RxWritingChallenge in 2017. As a young faculty member, she appreciated the training it provided for her to dive into scholarly work and the built-in time devoted to scholarship and writing. Excited by the progress happening in those groups, she even initiated a writing group at the University of Florida, where she was a faculty member at the time, leading to her promotion. She joined the journal club in 2021, which she says is one of her most-looked-forward-to weekly meetings.  

“I learned through participating in the [journal] group that reading the literature can help me be a better researcher,” Smith said. “I like that the group is diverse— multiple institutions, some grad students, some practitioners, even interprofessional colleagues— all those people are coming to this piece of literature that we're reading with different lenses, and it helps me see things in the article that I might not have otherwise seen. I've really enjoyed that richness and learned a lot from that.”

Smith has published papers, created posters, presented at meetings, and won awards with the colleagues she’s met through the Wulling Center initiatives. 

“I’d say I wouldn't have the number of publications I have— or the impact or depth of those publications— without having the background of these scholarly conversations I've had in the journal club…It’s just a new lens that I've put on as a faculty member that has set me apart from others. It’s been a helpful story to tell as I've sought promotion,” Smith said. “I've been part of the group for about five years now and it's been cool to see when newer people join… to see the types of questions they ask and watch them develop. There's a developmental aspect to it that as an educator, I really enjoy being part of as well.”