Learning in a contextually complex rural clinical placement

Introducing students to real-world contexts through clinical placements can provide rich learning experiences. In health professional education, these placements primarily focus on the supervised development of clinical skills within discipline-specific contexts. However, numerous implicit contexts influence the learning event, which may not be explicitly addressed in the placement’s curriculum or teaching structure but are nonetheless pedagogically significant. This study examines the distinctive contexts of a student-led, interdisciplinary Aboriginal allied health service placement in rural South Australia, highlighting the contexts’ unique experiential characteristics. We used a bricolage of phenomenological engagement and abductive thinking to investigate students’ experiences within and across these learning contexts. Students’ accounts revealed that their experiences at the intersections of these contexts held pedagogical significance. This finding prompts critical questions about the design and delivery of educational placements to maximise the inherent learning potential of contexts. We discuss the role of context in clinical placements and explore how context and context complexity can be effectively configured to support student learning across various clinical placement settings and models. We propose that developing context awareness and perspective, and attending to context convergence, can enhance meaningful learning in complex environments.