The European Union project (LEANBODY ERASMUS+ KA2 project) awarded to the anatomists of the University of Pécs is progressing well, in which we are rethinking the values of anatomy education traditions in the light of modern globalisation challenges, together with Croatian and Czech colleagues, anatomists from Cambridge and education development and quality management experts from Karolinska Institutet. The focus will be on quality, high failure rates, teacher-student mental health and protecting the real values of existing educational traditions. The project is coordinated by Dr András Dávid Nagy, Associate Professor.

In the framework of the LEANBODY project, between 15-19 August 2022, seven members of the Institute of Anatomy (Professor Dóra Reglődi, Associate Dean of Science, Andrea Lubics, András Nagy, Zoltán Rékási, Tibor Hollósy, László Kovács and Rékási) will be working together to promote the quality and the integrity of the teaching and learning environment. 
 

The LEANBODY project is an international collaboration led by Dr. András Dávid Nagy, Associate Professor of the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Tartu, which aims to provide the necessary methodological techniques and approaches for effective teaching of human anatomy in a multicultural and multilingual learning environment.
Our aim is to compare the advantages and disadvantages of teaching anatomy in Eastern and Western Europe, and at the end of the project, to implant the good practices that we find useful in our education system.Our partners in the project are the University of Cambridge (UK), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), University of Zagreb (Croatia) and Masaryk University Brno (Czech Republic).

We had our first joint meeting with the project staff in December 2021 in Brno, where we laid the foundations and set the objectives for the duration of the project. The aim of the August meeting was to learn about how colleagues in Western universities approach teaching.We heard a lot about the importance of professionalism in everyday life, and there was a strong emphasis on learning about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 4 - quality education. Several more sensitive topics were discussed, including dealing with students with mental health problems, cultural differences in relation to international students, and the need to reform educational illustrations (for example, the presentation of anatomical illustrations of white males only in anatomy publications is a very common phenomenon, and the need to have other races represented in anatomy education).We returned to Pécs enriched by our experiences and new perspectives, and we thank Professor Cecilia Brassett, Head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Cambridge, for the opportunity to be hosted by her and to learn about the Cambridge college system.

The next collaboration opportunity will take place in the summer of 2023, when we, the people of Pécs, will host the project's collaborators. We hope that we will gain new practices and experiences and contribute to making anatomy teaching even more challenging in all partner institutions.

Jason Sparks