A few days ago—or maybe it was weeks, time after all has been out of joint lately—my colleague, Tim Morton, tweeted something interesting. It seems to have sincebeen deleted, so I’ll have to paraphrase it from a memory whose reliability has already been called into question. But Morton said something like this: the humanities are…
Tag: Pedagogy
On Reimagining Health Humanities and Disability Studies Courses
This fall, I will be on sabbatical for the first time in my career. In many ways, I am overwhelmed by the possibilities afforded to me by this privilege of time and space so unique to academia and one that few other professions have built into the process of promotion. Yet I remain deeply aware…
“If It Is an Emergency, Please Call 911”: Framing Mental Health in Syllabi
Trigger warning: discussions of suicidality. Like many students, the first time I had access to therapy and other mental health services was when I studied at a university that had those services on campus (which was, for lots of complicated reasons, not until graduate school). Like many students, I’ve spent about as much time on various mental health waitlists as I have in any kind of treatment.
How We Teach How We Die
Emily Waples // This year—the most difficult year of my professional and personal life to date—I inherited a class called “How We Die.” Offered as part of my college’s Biomedical Humanities major, as well as fulfilling an “ethics and social responsibility” requirement for our general education curriculum, this four-credit course met for two hours twice…
Field Notes from the Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching and Communities of Curiosity
Travis Chi Wing Lau // This morning, I had the joy of attending a workshop with the growing Science and Nature Writing initiative at Kenyon College. During this interdisciplinary conversation, we discussed different approaches to pedagogy at multiple levels of undergraduate teaching: integrating a writing component into an intermediate science course, creative writing that interwove…
Pedagogy of the Pandemic: Narrative Medicine and Radical Empathy
Sayantani DasGupta, Author // Ibraim Nascimento, Painter // There is a rupture in higher education and in that rupture is an opportunity. As novelist Arundhati Roy (2020) has written, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway…
Write/Right About Your Body
Madeleine Mant // I teach Introduction to the Anthropology of Health to an exquisitely diverse group of second-year undergraduate students. The class is a gateway prerequisite to all upper-level health-stream courses, thus it necessitates a balance between the biological and sociocultural aspects of health anthropology. Students are exposed to the work of Gregor Mendel and…
Calling Medical Humanities Teachers!
Livia Arndal Woods // This is my last post as a regular writer for Synapsis. It has been such pleasure to participate in this growing community over the past two years. That participation has allowed me to explore a broad range interests in the Medical Humanities, interests that reach through and beyond my Victorianist scholarship….
Ars Moriendi
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” – Atul Gawande Last week, I flew…
Teaching Victorian Disability Studies
“What it must mean, if we are to be present in this age of challenges, is a profound rethinking of our pedagogical priorities, disciplinary boundaries, and subject positions. Let us actually be Victorianists.” –Christie Harner, “Victorian hybridities”[i] Travis Chi Wing Lau // As I begin to construct my syllabus for my introductory seminar on medical…