Drawing on Art to Hone Observational and Analytical Skills
Inspired by their participation in a Harvard Macy Institute Fellowship, three Humanities faculty are using the visual arts to refine medical students’ observational skills and spark new understandings of data.
The Art Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship introduces pedagogical methods and practices that “help illuminate different perspectives, promote greater insight, and facilitate communication,” said Michael Flanagan, MD, assistant dean for student affairs (University Park curriculum) and professor, Family and Community Medicine, who participated in the 2020 Fellowship cohort.
This fall, the UP curriculum included several sessions at the Penn State Palmer Museum of Art developed to emphasize first-year students’ observational and communication skills. Those sessions were designed by Flanagan and UP colleague Mark Stephens, MD, interim associate dean for medical education at UP, and professor, family and community medicine. “Arts-based activities provide an opportunity to practice skills and strategies that are relevant to medicine—awareness of biases, value of multiple perspectives, empathy,” said Stephens, a 2019 Fellow.
Kimberly Myers, PhD, professor of Humanities and Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine, a fall 2021 Fellow, is drawing on the program for “Observation & Interpretation,” a new Humanities course for first-year medical students at Hershey that is co-directed with
Justen Aprile, MD.
“By exploring how people experience a piece of art, we learn that our perspectives can be limited,” Myers said. “Listening to others’ observations can help us comprehend more completely and therefore interpret more accurately. Ideally, experiencing the arts also leads to empathy for others, another fundamental goal of practicing medicine.”
