Abstract
This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach (Portrait Approach)—and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait (HHP). Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing—with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the Humanities Initiative grant that enabled the portrait approach to be developed. Thank you to Deborah Hurtt (program officer) for believing in and supporting us throughout this work. Thank you to the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago College of Medicine for supporting this project as well. We would also like to thank the NEH participating experts (Rebecca Garden, Jodi Halpern, Gretchen Case, Ellen Amster, and Jonathan Metzl) and faculty core (Aly Patsavas, Carrie Sandahl, Kristi Kirshner, Laura Hirshfield, Gwyneth Milbrath, Matthew Gambino, Anna Maria Grammelspacher, Erica Laethem and Elsa Vasquez-Menendez, Joanna Michel, Michael Blackie and Sandy Sufian) who have been involved in this process for being thoughtful and committed to making the project so successful. We would also like to thank Madeline Lee for designing the project logo and our website and Lauren Zahn for her citation work. We deeply appreciate Lily Zheng, Shay Phillips, and Jay Mueller for their brilliant management of the project.
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Sufian, S., Blackie, M., Michel, J. et al. Centering Patients, Revealing Structures: The Health Humanities Portrait Approach. J Med Humanit 41, 459–479 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09640-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09640-8