Curating the medical humanities curriculum: twelve tips

As the head of a university-wide health humanities programme and a consultant ‘Humanities Lead’ to our medical school, I am often asked how to build arts and humanities-based sessions within the formal medical curriculum, given that teaching schedules are already oversubscribed. In many medical schools, such sessions remain optional or elective and as a result, may be perceived as less important than ‘obligatory content’ by students and faculty. Shapiro has designated this as a form of acquiescence where such teaching becomes ‘ornamental’ to an essentially biomedical model.1 As Bates and Bleakley remind us, the goal of most contemporary arts and humanities educators within medical schools is to have such teaching become provocative, relevant and mandatory so that issues of power and democratisation can be discussed critically and openly, and personal and systemic blind spots can be brought to light.2 Shapiro calls this approach a ‘resistance...
Source: Medical Humanities - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research