Traditionally, anatomy courses have consisted of didactic lectures that present a myriad of anatomical terms to students (Marx, Honeycutt, Clayton, & Moreno, 2006; Sugand, Abrahams & Khurana, 2010). Students have often approached this material with surface learning techniques that encourage rote learning and recall of disconnected facts (Biggs, 2003; Pandey and Zimitat, 2006). Anatomy education has thus been challenged to develop contemporary approaches to teaching and learning with an aim to move beyond factual recall to elicit from students meaningful and deep understandings of the discipline (Hermiz, O’Sullivan, Lujan & DiCarlo, 2011). Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is one such pedagogy that involves student’s active and increasingly independent investigation of questions and problems that are of interest to them (Dewey, 1938; Lee, Greene, Odom, Schechter, & Slatta, 2004). Utilizing a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, this study investigated anatomy students’ experiences of an inquiry-based project as a component of a second year undergraduate anatomy course. The inquiry project required that students pose and investigate an anatomically relevant question of interest in small groups of six. In this presentation, the curriculum design of this inquiry project will be discussed. Findings from the research study will demonstrate how this curriculum enabled students to: form effective learning communities; actively and creatively explore anatomy from new perspectives; and develop a range of skills useful both within and beyond the classroom.
