Feedback October 09 Issue IJCAIP Physicians Speak Out About Arts and Medicine

"Many thanks for the link and the mention. We are truly indebted."

Dr. Verna Yiu

University of Alberta Medicine and Health

"I am really looking forward to the other commentaries. A brief scan of them illustrates how much is going on in the Medical Humanities in Canada."

Martin Donohoe, MD FACP

"This issue looks very interesting thank you. I've also sent the link to David Rosen MD, (Texas A & M University) co-author of The Healing Spirit of Haiku.

Joel Weishaus

"Wow!!! An amazing source of knowledge.

Thanks."

Michelle Buckle

"Thank you! Issue 8 of IJCAIP is wonderful (both content wise and visually)! I enjoyed the entire issue..reading about the ways other physicians are incorporating the arts/literature into medical education was interesting, informative and inspiring. I am honoured to be included in this issue."

Seema Shah, MD, MSPH


See our most recent issue of IJCAIP "Physicians Speak Out About Arts and Medicine"

Subscribe free with an email to CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com "please subscribe"

IJCAIP October 09 Issue Explores Arts in Medical Education

Arts Alive and Thriving in Medical Education
C. McLean, Publisher IJCAIP

It has been reported that the use of arts and humanities in medical education may help develop observational skills and enhance understanding of the human condition. Programs integrating the arts and humanities in medical education continue to flourish and gain momentum with leading medical schools offering programming such as Stanford School of Medicine, Arts, Humanities and Medicine, established to “promote creative and scholarly work at the intersections between the arts, humanities and medicine in order to enhance our understanding of the contextual meanings of illness, healthcare, and the human condition.” In Canada, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Humanities in Medicine, offers five core initiatives: History of Medicine; Narrative Medicine (oral storytelling film, mass media, and literature); Music; Spirituality; and Visual Arts. The Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine Program at the University of Alberta was launched in May 2006. The program is directed to engendering a balance of scientific knowledge and compassionate care with a mission statement that formally acknowledges “the explicit recognition within the Faculty that clinical practice is both an art and a science.”

The arts are alive and thriving in medical education today, offering opportunities for learning and a place for self expression and healing. A leader in the field of Narrative Medicine, Dr. Rita Charon, Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University has long advocated for the use of narrative in medical education to honour stories of illness. Dr. Arthur Frank, Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary, and author of “The Wounded Storyteller, Body, Illness and Ethics”, writes about the meaningful uses of storytelling for those experiencing illness, “The personal issue of telling stories about illness is to give voice to the body, so the changed body can become once again familiar in these stories.”

In our current issue of IJCAIP, http://www.ijcaip.com, "Physicians Speak Out About Arts in Medicine" we've offered physicians a place to voice their stories and share how they use the arts in education.
Our featured article in issue 8 of The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP, “Stories and Society, Using Literature to Teach Medical Students About Public Health and Social Justice,” has been contributed by Martin Donohoe, MD, FACP, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Community Health, Portland State University and Senior Physician of Internal Medicine at The Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Centre. Donohoe offers an argument for “enhancing public health education of medical students through the use of literature with the goal of creating activist physicians knowledgeable about, and eager to confront, the social, economic and cultural contributions to illness”. He has also generously provided an extensive list of books, articles and resources. A follow up commentary by Jay Rosenfield, MD, MEd, FRCPC, Vice-Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, stresses the need for continuing research to examine the use of literature and story in medical education further, particularly when linked to advocacy and health of populations and patient outcomes.

Maureen Rappaport MD, FCCFP, is a family doctor who splits her time between working in a busy community practice in Montreal , Quebec, and teaching family medicine residents and medical students. In the article, “The Poetry of Practice” she writes about the creative writing course she teaches as an elective to fourth year medical students at McGill University, a course that provides an important place for students to express their feelings through narratives and poetry.

Physician and Educator Pippa Hall MD, CCFP, MEd, FCFP, at The University of Ottawa, has been a palliative care physician for over ten years. She has integrated arts into learning activities for pre-licensure students and in post graduate programs as well as in continuing professional development activities in nursing and spiritual care. She explains how she has found the arts in many forms provide opportunities for learning while offering new insights into the human condition.

Seema Shah, MD, MSPH, offers a unique perspective as both a physician and patient who has experienced chronic illness. Working with The University of British Columbia Community Partnerships for Health Professional Education Initiative, she facilitated group sessions using literature and story to help teach students about the lived experience of illness.

Our closing commentary explores the exciting potential for other innovative and creative technologies incorporated into teaching and medical education. Kim Bullock, MD, family medicine and emergency room physician, and Director of the Community Health Division and Assistant Director of Service Learning in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University, Medical Centre, Washington, believes digital storytelling in medical education has the potential to “link the social, environmental, and historical issues that influence health and illness through graphics”. “What emerges,” she writes, “are voices from the community that bear witness to issues that influence health including problems related to the environment, housing, public safety violence, inequities ..”

The voices represented in this issue of IJCAIP speak about progressive approaches to learning that have the potential to offer hope and change in education and in healthcare practice. There may yet be questions to be answered but, given the space, there will always be stories to tell and those who will witness, learn and be transformed.

Thanks to all the physicians who joined us in this issue of IJCAIP for sharing their articles and commentaries while contributing to this lively discussion about the arts in medical education.

Issue 8 is accessible and available at the website for subscribers.
We invite you to read the full articles available and accessible from the IJCAIP home page in HTML and PDF formats. We hope you will share these stories with your friends and colleagues.


C. McLean, Publisher IJCAIP



Subscribe free to IJCAIP Journal with an email to CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com "please subscribe"

Read more about the creative arts in interdisciplinary practice in the upcoming book “Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change” to
be published by Detselig/Temeron Press, 2010, Editor, Cheryl McLean, Associate Editor, Robert Kelly.

Qualitative Inquiry for a Global Community in Crisis, Conference 2010

The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2010)
May 26-29, 2010
2010 Dissertation Award

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY FOR A GLOBAL COMMUNITY IN CRISIS

The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from May 26-29, 2010. The theme of the 2010 Congress is "Qualitative Inquiry for a Global Community in Crisis." It is clear that in these troubling political times qualitative researchers are called upon to become human rights advocates, to honor the sanctity of life, and the core values of privacy, human dignity, peace, justice, freedom from fear and violence.

The 2010 Congress will offer scholars the opportunity to form coalitions, to engage in debate, and dialogue on how qualitative research can be used to can advance the causes of social justice, while addressing racial, ethnic, gender and environmental disparities in education, welfare and healthcare. Delegates will show how critical inquiry can be used to bridge gaps in cultural and linguistic understandings.

Sessions will take up such topics as: the politics of evidence; alternatives to evidence-based models; mixed-methods; public policy discourse; social justice; human subject research; indigenous research ethics; decolonizing inquiry; standpoint epistemologies. Contributors are invited to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new presentational formats (drama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, fiction). Such work will offer guidelines and exemplars showing how qualitative research can be used in the human rights and policy-making arenas.

On May 26 there will be pre-conference language events and on May 27, morning and afternoon professional workshops. The Congress will consist of keynote, plenary, featured, regular, and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque as well as a closing old fashioned Midwest cook-out.

We invite your submission of paper, poster and session proposals. Submissions will be accepted online only from October 1 until December 1 2009. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2009. To learn more about the Sixth International Congress and how to participate, please visit our website <www.icqi.org>.

Keynote speakers

Cynthia Dillard (Nana Mansa II), Ohio State University

"Learning to Remember the Things We've Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms and the Sacred Nature of Research."

Abstract

Colonial and racialized histories have created fragmentation, dislocation, and dismemberment for many, including African and other people color. These entanglements and geneologies of diaspora and location strongly influence the consciousness of African ascendant women throughout the world, even as we negotiate the countless influences that shape and impact both our individual and collective consciousness and particularities as African women. These are always and in all ways contested spaces and locations that are deeply spiritual, situated, and embodied. Collectively, we are not born "Black women": We become Black women, a cross-cultural diversity of nationalities, socio economic classes, sexual identities, spiritual beliefs and generational distinctions. And, as Audre Lorde suggested years ago, a critical part of any becoming is also about learning each other's (her)stories and resisting the temptation to compare or create hierarchies of oppression between and among the collective. This includes a deeper recognition of the ways in which we all have been collectively seduced into forgetting who we are as women (or have chosen to do so), given the weight and power of memory and the truly radical act that re-membering may represent in our present lives and work as researchers. Whether through the ravages of colonization or slavery and their inequitable outcomes, we have learned to be both complicit and vigilant in this process of figuring out who we are, who we are becoming. But in order to heal, to put the pieces back together again, we must learn to re-member the things that we've learned to forget, including engagements and dialogues in cross-cultural community that theorize our differing migrations, experiences and definitions. In this way, remembering becomes a response to our individual and collective fragmentation at the spiritual and material levels, a response to the divisions created between mind, body and spirit, and a response to our on-going experience and understanding of "what difference difference makes" (Wright, 2003).

Feminist research has both held and contested experience as a category of epistemological importance, but primarily as a secular one. Absent any attention to spirit, experience is also constructed as absent the sacred. However, the sacred is fundamental to a Black feminist epistemology and research, given the historical and cultural experiences of African ascendant women worldwide. How can re-membering bear witness to our individual and collective consciousness and generate new theories and conduct of feminist research? Through examples from her work in Ghana, West Africa, Dillard explores how locatedness, rootedness, experience and memory engage and create an endarkened feminist subjectivity and spirituality that both re-members and opens possibilities for research as sacred praxis.

Isamu Ito University of Fukui, Japan

"Globalizing The Rural: Reflections of a Qualitastive Japanese Rural Sociologist."

Partial List of Session and Paper Topics

The topics for the 6th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry include, but are not confined to: Autoethnography & Performance Studies, Decolonizing Truth, Democratic Methodologies, Evidence and Social Policy, Human Rights, Indigenous Law, Justice as Healing, Standards for Qualitative Inquiry, Forms and Varieties of Justice, Participatory Action Research, Politics of Evidence, Research as Resistance, Restorative Justice, Social Justice, Community Ethics, visual sociology, hypertext explorations, visual ethnography.

The Congress will also consist of keynote, plenary, spotlight, featured, regular and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque, and a closing old-fashioned Midwest cook-out.
We invite your submission of paper, poster and session proposals. Submissions will be accepted online only from October 1 until December 1 2009. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2009.

From the website at: http://www.icqi.org/

To learn more about the Sixth International Congress and how to participate, please email info@icqi.org.