Reflecting on STS Practice at a Medical School: Innovative, Critical, Application?!?

• In Event: What STS Can Do: Innovations and Alternatives for STS Practice – II

Abstract

What does the messy work of using the methods, texts, and practices of the interdisciplinary (and anti-disciplinary) field of STS to teach medical students a course on medical humanities and the cultures of medicine look like? The course is taught over the a five week period using a theme each week to critically introduce the students to common medical issues and a cacophony of perspectives, values, and related social/cultural issues. The themes are: Pain, Cancer, Death, Disability, and Empathy. Each week students read a number of humanities texts and are asked to critically and reflexively engage with the topic through discussion, short written pieces, and other media. The course is innovative in that it uses a STS pedagogical approach in a medical school. However, the medical school administrators would like the course to foster, if not teach, the students empathy. This setting may not be the best fit for this application as the students themselves are recalcitrant to the term empathy and they often struggle with (or lack) the imaginative capacity of bridging from the course work to the potential clinical work. In light of this intended application, I maintain that the course continues to use what Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak call “engagement and reflexive learning” strategies, and, in this way, I apply STS sensibilities to medical education. In this paper, I reflect on the innovative, critical, and application aspects of this STS in practice. How does this practice reflect and defy the three main tributaries of STS training?

Author

• Cora Olson, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine