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Emerging Diversities in Health Humanities Teaching

Sponsored by Hiram College’s Center for Literature and Medicine, this Seminar brings together health humanities educators for three days of interactive sample classes, lightning talks, poster sessions and small-group discussions. Participants will leave with innovative skills and new materials to adapt to their own teaching.

Health humanities teaching is inherently diverse — in its disciplinary approaches, materials, subjects, theories and settings — and this seminar seeks to make that diversity accessible to its participants, modeling the commitment of the health humanities to enacting inclusion, access and plurality in health and healthcare. Set amid Hiram’s peaceful campus in Northeast Ohio, this seminar will bring health humanities educators into an intimate setting of exchange and participatory learning with colleagues.

Location: Hiram, Ohio Organizers: Erin G. Lamb, Ph.D. and Sarah Berry, Ph.D.

Featured Class Sessions

Katherine Burke

Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine

“Verbatim Theatre as a Meta-Reflective Activity”

Verbatim theatre is a postmodern style of performance that uses interviews, found text and personal narratives to create scripts. These performances are often compelling calls to reflection and action, and represent the identity, opinions and experiences of a community. Two weeks prior to this symposium, participants will be asked to submit a brief reflective writing focusing on diversity in health humanities. Those writings will be transformed into a 15-minute staged reading with text taken verbatim from the reflections. Following the performance we will engage in dialogue about the reflective writings and their collective meaning as represented in the play.

Jessica Hume

Bellarmine University

“Poetry and Identity: How to Lead a Poetry Workshop for Those in Remission”

In this workshop, participants will get a poet and teacher’s insight about first-hand experience leading a poetry workshop for women in remission from breast cancer. We will discuss planning, structure and recruitment, and planning each session of the workshop, including specific poems and writing exercises. Finally, participants will spend the majority of the session in a sample workshop conducted by the workshop leader. To prepare, participants should read Sharon Olds’ “The Summer Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb,” and write a poem in response to the prompt: “When someone leaves me, what do they take away?”

Julie Aultman

Northeast Ohio University of Medicine AND

Liz Piatt

Hiram College

“Blankets: Professional Development and Community Awareness through Reflective Practice”

In this interactive session, participants will be provided with a background to reflective practice and its current uses, benefits, and limitations in education and community awareness. To illustrate reflective practice, participants will engage in a close reading of two short stories (“Blankets” by Alex La Guma and “Blankets” by Sherman Alexie). Themed by the very symbolism of the blanket, the reflective practice session will model the value of understanding oneself in relation to others, calling attention to gender biases, racial and ethnic disparities and stereotypes, tradition and family, poverty and feelings ranging from despair and hopelessness to hope and comfort.
Leni Marshall

University of Wisconsin-Stout

“Every Body Ages: Contemporary Feature Films, Health Humanities and Age Studies in the Classroom”

Students love it when their “textbook” wins an Oscar! Contemporary popular films can increase student engagement, broaden student perspectives and convey valuable, yet often overlooked, insights into health humanities topics, including age studies. In this sample class session, participants review and practice applying basic film studies and age studies vocabulary, definitions and analytical questions using clips from movies such as “Bridge of Spies,” “Spotlight” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Participants will also generate and receive feedback on a lesson plan that incorporates health humanities age studies analyses in their own classes – because every body ages.

Craig Klugman

DePaul University

“Art Rounds: Teaching Observation and Communication Through Museum Art”

Art Rounds is a program that brings health professions students to art museums to learn observation skills. Through the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) system, students learn to see deeply, to listen and reflect, to become more comfortable with ambiguity and to increase their communication skills. In this session, participants will engage in a demonstration of the VTS method. They will learn more about the course structure, including assignments. I will share the results of the rigorous pre-/post-testing of students (including standardized instruments, student comments and thematic analysis of free writing about images) that demonstrate what students gained from the experience.

Margie Hodges Shaw

University of Rochester Medical Center AND

Marianne Chiafery

University of Rochester School of Nursing

“A Framework and Methods for Teaching Bioethics Knowledge, Skills and Behaviors”

In this session participants will engage in educational activities designed to teach knowledge, skills and behaviors necessary for bioethical decision-making. The content is neonatal decision-making, but the framework supports any bioethics content and any level of learning. Explore your personal values about decisions at the margins of life; consider the values of others; learn the historical and current legal and professional obligations; and practice skills necessary for navigating morally complex decisions. This workshop includes a team-based learning exercise, a shared media experience, individual reflection, class discussion and mini-lectures. Come test what methods and strategies you can adopt.

Sylvia Pamboukian
Robert Morris University

“A Dog’s Life; or, Why I Want to Be Treated by James Herriot, Veterinarian”

Veterinarian James Herriot has long delighted readers with his stories about the animals of the Yorkshire Dales. After reading the assigned stories prior to class, students will practice close reading, a strategy of information gathering that focuses on how specific words, phrases, images and metaphors subtly influence readers’ perceptions. Based on the close reading, students will then construct persuasive arguments using counterargument as a way of anticipating objections. Arguments may address themes such as the use of pets in health care and the challenges of maintaining “professionalism” in the face of class differences and of tricky conditions such as obesity.
Stephanie Brown Clark

University of Rochester Medical Center

“Foreign Bodies: The Private Parts of Sara Baartman”

In this session, which is part of a semester-long course on the History of the Body, we will consider the “foreign body” of Sara Baartman, a young Koisan woman brought from South Africa to Europe in the early 19^th century; she was exhibited as a human curiosity and examined privately by scientists at the Natural History Museum in Paris. Using scientific notes, newspaper commentaries, ads and cartoons about her during her European “tour,” we will discuss the Hottentot Venus to understand the intersections of science, politics and culture on her black, female and foreign body in the 19^th century and its resonances with race, biology and gender in 21^st–century healthcare.

Siobhan Conaty

La Salle University

“Learning How to ‘Look’ Like an Art Historian: Medieval versus Renaissance Bodies”

What can we tell about a culture or time period by looking at how the human body is depicted in art? A lot. The basic skills gained in an art history course help develop visual literacy: the ability to construct meaning from an image. These are transferable skills that serve students in the field of health sciences quite well. Participants in this session will work in small groups and engage in the art historical method — exercises that teach a keen sense of observation, the investigation of social context, and a final analysis. The second part of the session will involve a larger group discussion of shared observations and conclusions.

Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss
University of Rochester

“Art and Chaplaincy Training”

The University of Rochester’s (UR) School of Medicine and Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) annually train over 500 individuals studying and working in healthcare, including students training to be hospital chaplains. UR’s Art and Observation program features a “5-Question Protocol,” with two questions that focus attention on self-awareness. While important in all healthcare professions, self-awareness is particularly important for hospital chaplains who serve the spiritual needs of patients from diverse faith traditions, often quite different from their own religious backgrounds and beliefs. Using the “5-Question Protocol” with sacred images from MAG’s collection, you will be introduced to ways that art has helped prepare chaplains for the particular challenges they meet daily.