Dan Pratt, PhD
Scholar
Dr. Dan Pratt is Professor Emeritus of Adult & Higher Education in the Department of Educational Studies and holds a cross appointment to the Faculty of Medicine, in the Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES). Dr. Pratt was a faculty member for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Educators’ Course (2004-2011) and a faculty member for the Harvard Macy Institute for the Health Professions (2009-2021). Dr. Pratt has been a visiting professor and consultant at universities across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Dr. Pratt’s primary area of scholarship and academic interest is in teaching and learning.
Research Interests
Dan Pratt’s scholarship and professional practices have focused on the exploration of teaching and learning across variations in disciplinary traditions, professional contexts, social and cultural norms. With his graduate students he identified antecedents that give rise to significant differences in how we understand and enact the social role of teacher. The central message of his work is that effective teaching is cultural, situational, and personal. There must be, therefore, a plurality of good teaching, rather than a singular orthodoxy of good teaching. The implications are most critical when considering how to facilitate learning, but also when considering how to develop and/or evaluate another’s teaching.
Awards
In 1992 Dan received the Killam Teaching Prize at UBC. His book, “Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education”, won the Cyril O. Houle Award for most outstanding literature in adult education in 1999. In 2008 he received Canada’s most prestigious university teaching award – the 3M National Teaching Fellowship. Dan was inducted into the Adult and Continuing Education International Hall of Fame in 2011. And in 2012, Dan Pratt and John Collins won the Imogene Okes Research/Scholarship Award for their work on the validity and reliability of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI).
Publication Highlights
Pratt DD, Dumoulin AR, Minosky SA, Jarvis Selinger J, Armstrong E, Gooding HC (submitted). Trends & disruptions in Pedagogical Identity: What was learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? Perspectives on Medical Education.
Pratt DD. (2023). Teaching perspectives: a philosophical foundation for methods, Methods for Facilitating Adult Learning: Strategies for enhancing instruction and instructor effectiveness, Coryell, Baumgartner, & Bohonos (Eds), Stylus Publishing.
Dumouline AR, Rusticus SA, and Pratt DD (2021).The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E10: Trends and Disruptions in Teaching Perspectives: https://harvardmacy.podbean.com/e/hmi-podcast-s2-e10/
Pratt DD, Schrewe B, Pusic MV. (2019). Pedagogical validity: The key to understanding different forms of ‘good’ teaching, Medical Teacher, DOI: 10.1080/0142159X.2018.1533242
Pratt DD. (2019). Teaching, Critical Care Educator’s Podcast, Australia: http://critcareedu.com.au/the-plurality-of-good-teaching-with-dan-pratt/
Maggio, Daley, Pratt, Torre. (2018). Honoring Thyself in the Transition to Online Teaching, Academic Medicine, 93(8), 1129-1134.
Pratt, Smulders & Associates. (2016). Five Perspectives on Teaching: Mapping a Plurality of the Good in Teaching. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing.
Hopkins, Regehr & Pratt. (2016). A framework for negotiating positionality in phenomenological research, The Medical Teacher: AAME Guide (online version 9270 words, available online 2016).
Hopkins, Pratt, Bowen & Regehr. (2015). Integrating basic science without integrating basic scientists: Reconsidering the place of individual teachers in curriculum reform. Academic Medicine, 90(2), 149-153.
Pratt, Sadownik & Jarvis-Selinger. (2012). Pedagogical BIASes and clinical teaching in medicine. In L. M. English (Ed.), Health and Adult Learning, 273-296, Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Collins & Pratt. (2011). The teaching perspectives inventory at ten years and 100,000 respondents: Reliability and validity of a teacher self-report inventory. Adult Education Quarterly, 61(4), 358-375.