Spring 2010 Courses

NMED K4030.  Witnessing Our Words: A Narrative Medicine Writing Seminar in Poetry and Prose.  4 pts.

Description

Narrative Medicine is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the interces of arts, science, social science and humanities. In both its scholarly applications and its clinical training, narrative medicine honors the written word – its ambiguity and nuance, its power and polish.

This unique multi-genre, multi-author writing seminar will focus on the craft of both poetry and prose. Through four modules of three class sessions each, recognized and established authors in poetry, fiction, memoir, and nonfiction writing will guide the class participants through both writing exercises and discussions of the craft of each genre. In addition, the course will be coordinated by one of the narrative medicine core faculty, who will help tie the four disparate modules together, and create time for workshopping of participant writing. The course will end with an open session for student readings from their work.

NMED K4110.  Close Reading and Reflective Writing in the Clinical Context I (Seminar).  4 pts.

Description

The objectives of this course are to build close reading skills and to develop approaches to reflective writing in the clinical setting. Narrative training for interdisciplinary groups of health care professionals is a promising method for improving both the clinical care provided and the lived experiences of the professionals. Attention to how stories are told, where a story begins and ends, who’s included in the story, whether or not it runs along a familiar plot line, how the teller’s affect changes in the course of the telling are habits of mind for some people and acquired skills for others. A fundamental premise of this course is that literary interpretation is an ethical act that stresses the importance of the interpreter in the process of interpretation. It calls for a suspension, or recognition, of judgment so that observation can take place. From the classic “hermeneutic circle” (from part to whole) to Arthur Frank’s approach of “reading with” stories to Michael White’s theories of narrative-based therapy, the class examines different ways to effectively combine close reading with timed reflective writing exercises. As many students will be returning to medical institutions as narrative medicine administrators or facilitators, this course focuses on developing methods for teaching and facilitating discussion and on developing and responding to writing exercises with health care professionals. Literary texts offer a broad range of genres, voices, narrative strategies, and techniques, including short stories, prose poems, memoirs, novels, and a few films.

NMED K4111.  Close Reading and Reflective Writing in the Clinical Context II (Practicum).  4 pts.

Description

Concurrently with the Close Reading and Reflective Writing in the Clinical Context I (seminar), students will be engaged in its partner activity, the “Practicum/Internship.” Each student enrolled in this Seminar is assigned to a teaching post in a clinically inflected writing workshop. The aim of the practicum is to give each student supervised responsibility for leading close reading discussions and coaching writing in the clinical setting. Each practicum site will be supervised by a faculty member in Narrative Medicine.

The distinct goal of the practicum is to provide each student with field experience in setting up and directing a close reading and reflective writing workshop. It is expected that the students will use the skills developing in the seminar in their student-teaching. Opportunities will be provided at the meetings of the seminar and in the time slot following the seminar to debrief on and share experiences about the practicum experience. Flexible arrangements for these practicum meetings will be considered for particular students with permission of the faculty. 

NMED K4220.  Narrative, Health, and Social Justice.  4 pts.

Description

Narrative medicine, its practice and scholarship, is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and inter-subjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world. This course explores the connections between narrative, health, and social justice. In doing so, it broadens the mandate of narrative medicine, challenging each of us to bring a critical, self-reflective eye to our scholarship, teaching, practice, and organizing. How are the stories we tell, and are told, manifestations of social injustice? How can we transform such stories into narratives of justice, health, and change?

NMED K4290.  Narratives of Death, Living & Caring at the End of Life.  4 pts.

Description

Death and dying, like birth and birthing, are medical events in modern society. Most of us end life as we began it—in the hospital, with “strangers at the bedside,” as David Rothman writes, and often as cyborgs imbedded with machinery that externalizes even as it embodies life itself. Is it indeed possible to be part of this medicalization process and yet understand and connect with dying and death from within the experience of the person? The intention of the course is to bring students to a deeper understanding of their own connection to death and dying, to a stronger connection to the experience of dying for dying people, and to a more caring sensitivity to those who care for others at the end of life. While we live we are the subject: our lives unfold in stories and are connected to others through narrative. By using narrative to better understand our own feelings toward death and dying, as well as connecting to the experience of others, we become better clinicians and more effective caregivers. The course explores the meaning of death and its cultural construction in western and non-western societies; the definitions of death and the place of the individual at the intersection of physiological, technological, legal, and philosophical interpretations; and the experience of death in the personal and in the public spheres. We use narratives by patients, families, caregivers, and clinicians in different media to explore these dimensions, as well as using secondary sources built on narrative and narrative analysis.