Physiotherapy curricula and Indigenous Peoples: A snapshot of Canadian physiotherapy programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In recent years, Canadian universities have been striving to improve engagement with Indigenous Peoples, knowledges and perspectives. Despite these efforts, and in the absence of national guidance, little is known about what changes are taking place in physiotherapy curricula, nor what processes are undertaken to develop and implement these changes. Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore how Canadian physiotherapy curricula are changing in relation to Indigenous Peoples and their communities.Methods: This study used a cross-sectional design informed by a theoretical framework of transformative learning. Canadian physiotherapy program faculty participated in a questionnaire-based interview from February to July 2020. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, and this was also informed by a critical anti-colonial lens.Results: Fourteen of the 15 Canadian physiotherapy programs were represented. Programs demonstrated great diversity in content areas taught, number of teaching hours per content area, and teaching and assessment methods, with total mandatory teaching time ranging from 45 minutes to 41 hours. Eleven programs were planning to increase curricular content and eight programs had at least one Indigenous person involved in teaching. Open-ended responses were organised into five themes related to curricular development processes: An Indigenous Worldview is Key; Universities are Putting Supports in Place; Processes are Complex and Challenging; Faculty Members Have Learning Needs; and Drivers for Change.Conclusion: Diversity in curricular content between programs is likely related to curricular development being driven by local faculty member initiative and institutional directive rather than national guidelines. Physiotherapy programs are attempting to engage with Indigenous Peoples, however there was minimal mention of power structures such as settler colonialism, racism and White supremacy within curriculum development processes. The results of this study highlight the need for: (1) conceptualization of anti-colonial, anti-racist and culturally safe physiotherapy; (2) relational accountability to Indigenous Peoples; (3) faculty development; and (4) collaboration between Canadian PT programs. This thesis also describes a settler graduate student’s process of ‘coming to know’
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".