The empowering lyrics from The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi “ (“when you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything”) offer a useful analogy for how massage educators conceptualise building massage skills and knowledge. For me, the lyrics suggest an orchestration of musicality and an ability to understand how notes work individually and collectively to create the melody we recognise and appreciate. Constructing the melody requires a careful balance of knowing what works. Taken in isolation, we could simply argue that orchestration is the arrangement of notes. I suggest that the principles of orchestrating notes are aligned with the development of knowledge and skills. In massage training, the emphasis is on covering the content in a syllabus. Students are expected to learn techniques, develop knowledge, skills and professional competencies and use the workspace to gain experience of application. In designing massage therapy learning experiences, the focus needs to shift from content to context by enabling students to become students, i.e. to learn how to learn.
How best do we design the learnscape and consider what matters most in teaching and training future therapists? The learnscape is like a landscape, but it centres the learner within learning. It provides a conceptual map of how best to position learning content so that the learner is able to acquire the necessary skills for success.
In this article, I explore strategies for designing effective learning environments. I reposition the alignment between learning and teaching and posit that the tutor becomes a facilitator of learning. In this sense, I call for a shift from passive to active learning strategies grounded in the social construction of knowledge. I further challenge the concepts of knowing and knowledge, and weave them through the design of both learning and learner outcomes.
My educational philosophy is modelled on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a framework for inquiring into student learning by attending to context, partnerships, and the appropriate public sharing of outcomes. SoTL resides within the corridors of Higher Education but has value and reach for all educational environments. Peter Felten, a renowned SoTL scholar, wrote about what matters most in educational experiences. He examined education's delicate fabric to reveal the architecture of learning. In his collaborative work, he explains that the learning experience is modelled on a common set of commitments that define and enhance student learning. These commitments fall into six core themes.
Learning Matters: represents a spectrum from student to curriculum learning, by adapting to change and repositioning the core challenges inherent in the learning environment (in our instance, the learnscape)
Relationship Matters: expands the importance of connected learning experiences across curricular and professional domains. This supports students developing co-created partnerships with staff to solve problems and build employability skills.
Expectations Matter: outlines the relevance of carefully considered expectation outcomes so that students and staff understand requirements and outcomes
Alignment Matters: here, structural and contextual alignment of policy, learning practice, and student voice merge to provide a cohesive learning environment.
Improvement Matters: this theme supports the asking of critical and directed questions to enable improvement and often transformation of policy and practice.
Leadership Matters: this final theme represents leadership and shared vision with purposefully directed change to enrich learning and learning development.
These themes connect to foreground how learning experiences develop, succeed and shape career aspirations. Equally, if themes misalign, students may lack the opportunity to apply knowledge, creating a disconnect between knowledge and knowing. Some massage training mistakenly focuses on transmitting knowledge rather than the skills of knowing. I argue that knowing is active inquiry into components of knowledge. When knowledge makes sense and has agency, it transforms one’s ability to know.
The massage therapy learning environment provides opportunities to explore and experiment with learning content. The diversity of student groups further enriches the learning experience by recognising culture within the curriculum. More recently, there has been a move toward inclusive learning strategies that create space for students to co-design the learning content. Typically, massage therapy training focuses on setting learning outcomes and ensuring students meet them through practice and assessment. However, a hidden curriculum often unfolds alongside the main taught curriculum. This hidden curriculum rests on the belief that students should be autonomous learners and take responsibility for their learning. To this end, expectations of learning content may not necessarily align with prior learning experience. This makes purposeful connections between lived and learned experiences. One key aspect of massage therapy training should be the inclusion of evidence-based practice, by strategically providing students with resources to understand, analyse, challenge, and possibly produce research and scholarship that informs decision-making and reframes practice-based questions.
Professional training curricula are often determined by professional association requirements. Tutors are required to teach set skills and assess core competencies. This then informs practice rights and insurance. Whilst some curricula are clearly developed, many unfortunately are not, leaving tutors to decide what matters most and how to teach the content. Training lengths differ considerably, which further complicates quality and standards regulation. Whilst this article is beyond the scope to delve into the intricacies of standards and curriculum design, it is worth mentioning these simply to remind the reader of the broader issues surrounding massage therapy education.
Returning to what matters most, I now consider practical strategies for engaging students by clearly positioning them within the learning environment. In doing so, I build a culture of lifelong learning and redirect the idea that a good course simply teaches skills for passing assessments. I also suggest that tutors reflect purposefully on the reasons for educating therapists by designing curricula that support practitioner success through applying knowledge in practice, using research to make informed decisions, and knowing how to learn.
How best do we reach students? What strategies work? Through my professional and educational journeys, I have discovered many strategies and learned many lessons. In fact, my greatest teachers have been the students I have taught. They have taught me to view learning through different lenses and see the unseen. My students have enabled me to ask three types of questions: “what works” questions, “seeking evidence about the relative effectiveness of different approaches”; “what is” questions, “describing what it looks like”; and “visions of the possible” questions, framing learning experiences in a new way. These three questions support my SoTL philosophy about what works best with the students I teach. When designing educational experiences, it is important to reflect on these questions and work not simply to do things better (improving practice) but to do better things (transforming practices).
What works
The strategies below are examples of learning activities and skills that foreground the impact of teaching on learning. They are modelled on understanding learning dynamics and creating safe spaces for creative, innovative design of learning experiences.
Start lessons with introductory hooks. Get students excited about the learning.
Connect learning to real–world examples. This principle motivates tutors to teach and assess authentically. It further promotes interest in learning by connecting the individual learning experience with the work experience.
Get to know the students. Once we know our students, we can design learning that supports individual needs. Focus on learner outcomes, not necessarily learning outcomes. Remember, education is not the passive transmission of knowledge but the excitation of exploring possibilities, practices, and problems together.
Read the room. This principle is fundamental to learning. Notice what happens in the classroom; don’t simply normalise the behaviour. This thesis of noticing vs normalising is central to compassion pedagogy.
Promote inquiry and co-creation. It is important to provide opportunities for students to discover research and connect what they learn to an evidence base. This is often achieved through group work activities and collaboration.
Good educational experiences are often scaffolded, giving students opportunities to experiment with their learning. Remember students are in the process of becoming professionals. They are not there yet, so they need tutor support in mastering competencies.
Ask good questions. Good questions stretch student thinking and create challenge within the learning environment. It is more important to teach students to ask or frame good questions than to give answers to questions asked. I am not advocating that we avoid answering questions, but rather repositioning how we ask questions and which questions best direct learning outcomes.
Allow time to think. Give students the time to think through answers. Sometimes, some tutors are more obsessed with completing curriculum content, so they give insufficient time for developing thoughts and applications.
Try new things. Do not be afraid to experiment. Include students in decision-making and in ideas that will shape their learning experiences. Invite students to suggest new activities and things they enjoy most. This will give students agency and voice and could promote a more inclusive learning environment
Be personable and human. Allow students to recognise and appreciate the person behind the practice. We all make mistakes and have all been students. Remember learning success stems from interaction, discussions and meaningful relationships.
In this article, I focused on what matters most in designing massage therapy education by connecting personal and professional experiences. I suggest that active learning strategies and asking three questions to discover what works best are imperative to designing meaningful learning. As we move toward educating the therapists of the future, we, as educators, must also stop, reflect, and rethink what matters most. We need to revisit impact, value and reach and carefully design education that works in an evolving world and learnscape. Whilst content may be important, context, culture, creativity and collaboration become the fabric around which we weave our learning and teaching threads.
Earle Abrahamson
Earle Abrahamson is an award-winning educator passionate about inspiring students and helping them reach their full potential. He is a strong advocate for widening participation and access in higher education. He has pioneered student engagement through his award-winning, internationally recognised peer mentoring programme, which develops students holistically.
Earle Abrahamson is an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching at the University of Hertfordshire, National Teaching Fellow, Principal Fellow of Advance HE and inaugural ISSOTL fellow. He is an internationally published author, scholar, registered therapist and psychologist. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Earle gained qualifications and expertise in sport science and sports therapy, clinical psychology and educational practices. He is a registrant board member on the CNHC, and former course leader for sports therapy at the University of East London and chair of the MTI. Together with Jane Langston he has authored two texts on anatomy and muscle testing. Earle is a practising musculoskeletal clinician. He has worked at major sports events including London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, 2017 World Athletics Championships and the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.
