Encountering Complexity in Collaborative Learning Activities: an Exploratory Case Study with Undergraduate Health Professionals

An emerging challenge for educators of the health professions in undergraduate programmes is appropriately and adequately preparing students for the complexity they will encounter in practice. New graduate health professionals report increasing challenges transitioning to practice in contemporary health care environments due to the complexity encountered. Although literature on complexity science in health professional education is growing, research evidence on learning opportunities for students related to complexity remains sparse. This exploratory case study examined first-year health care students' encounters with complexity in a student-driven collaborative learning activity taking place over one academic semester outside the classroom. Rather than reproducing complexity in a scripted simulation activity, these novices were stimulated to adapt and respond to authentic complexity through a challenging amount of independence and definition of only minimal enabling constraints i.e. basic ground rules of the learning activity and goals to be achieved. 67 students were assigned to small groups with four to five members to form 15 interprofessional collectives (laboratory technology n = 9; medicine n = 13; midwifery n = 1; nursing n = 28; physiotherapy n = 7; radiography n = 4; speech language therapy n = 5). Data was collected using a self-reflection form with narrative free text hand-written answers. Open coding and an inductive-deductive approach to qualitative content analysis of transcribed responses resulted in identification of two key themes: a) reflecting on interprofessional collaboration, and b) evaluating the interprofessional collectives. Our findings showed that rather than perceiving the learning activity in its cognitive and collaborative complexity and feeling overwhelmed, first-year health care students described rising to the challenge and stretching outside their comfort zones. Complexity was tacitly experienced but perceived as a stimulating challenge and successfully navigated within the interprofessional collectives as they collaborated together over time.