This past week some awesome PLA students approached me about this new program Students Teaching Students that they are starting up next semester. This program was formulated to a fill a need within the Penn State curriculum that has not been met. Students are then able to teach a special topics course on the subject with the help of a faculty advisor to then meet those needs.
My best friend Madison and I decided to start a class on bias within the healthcare system, something I have become very passionate about this semester due to my sociology 451 course that discusses bias, racism, social determinates of health among other things relating to healthcare. As a person who tends to be a bit naïve and look at the world through rose colored glasses this class has provided a lot of shocking evidence about the dark realities of racism and implicit bias that is built into the foundation of medicine. The “father of gynecology” did his surgical research on slaves and performed surgeries on them without anesthetics to fix gynecological problems before performing the same surgeries with anesthetics on white women. The Tuskegee experiments run by the federal government on poor black men in Macon County, Alabama for 40 years between 1932 to 1972, also prove that explicit racism and exploitation of black people in America is in the very recent past, which doesn’t even begin to attest to implicit bias prevalent within medical school text books and course work.
The sad thing is that I am a 7th semester student, almost finished with my college career and if I hadn’t chosen this class out of a huge list of courses, I would never had known any of this. I think another factor that plays into that is the fact that I am white and have never had to be exposed to this cause most of these horrific acts were being performed on black people by white people, but I also think the pre-med department and course requirements have been doing a large disservice to their students. These topics on racism, inequality, and discrepancies in care quality are topics that should be discusses thoroughly and be a mandatory part of the curriculum for anyone thinking about going into the medical field. It is ridiculous that it took this long to find out about this.
Because of all the above reasons Madison and I are planning on teaching a course on this topic to help students gain awareness of their biases and hopefully provide both implicit bias training along with social justice training. But that is a lot harder to plan than anticipated. The bureaucracy at Penn State is very hard to figure out and each major and department has different requirements on who can teach courses and how long it takes courses to be approved, which seems a bit stupid cause we are all a part of the same University, but such is life. We will hopefully be getting it approved by the anthropology department after looking into a few different options. We have also been working on a syllabus, a course outline, times for when the course can run, how to put it on Lionpath, how many people we can have, where the class will take place. It is so much more work than I even realized, and I have been both a TA and an RA.
This experience thus far has really given me a much larger respect for the professors at Penn State and all the time and effort that have to put into each course for it to run smoothly and be effective. Also, if anyone is interested in this class feel free to groupme me or email me!
Sam,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had so much trouble navigating the bureaucracy, because this is such an important and relevant course to teach. From my understanding of things – and understand that I’m not as well-versed as I’d like to be – beyond healthcare disparities in insurance coverage itself, one of the primary variables driving health outcome disparity is implicit bias in treatment. I think that this course could do a really great job of exposing that to students, what it mean, what it means during diagnosing, and how important it is to take reports by patients seriously regardless of the implicit assumptions we make about their truthfulness.
You’re going to be a rock-star teacher. I have struggled in developing our course, but I know in the end it’s going to be worth it.
Best of luck with finals!
– Cory
Hi Samantha,
I am so glad you decided to write about this topic because it is something I have grown more aware of and passionate about throughout college too! The class you are currently in sounds fascinating and I think that the class you are planning to teach will be extremelely beneficial to all. As I go through the medical school application process, I have been granted the opportunity to talk to many current medical students. This is a topic that I always bring into the discussion because I am interested to see how each school is working to shed light on this issue. I am happy to report that many schools have taken the initiaitve in the last few years to incorporate courses on social issues and bias in the health field into their cirriculums. I think this is so important for the future improvement of medicine. However, I also think it is important for all people to be aware of these issues as we are all consumers of health care. I am grateful that you are taking the opportunity to spread such knowledge.
Best,
Brigette Cannata
Hello Samantha,
Thank you very much for your blog. I had no idea of this program and it sounds extremely interesting! I too share a passion for teaching and think its great that the university is helping provide this experience. I think its a very good sign for your course that you have a strong passion for the subject. A piece of advice I would like to give you is the impact that being enthusiastic and genuine has on students. As a student, I am always much more inclined to be a more engaged student when the professor is extremely passionate about the subject. I think you will do great, and will help share your course should people be interested.