When: January 15- March 11, 2025. Classes will be held every Tuesday 1/21- 3/11 at 4:30 PM EST and asynchronous
Where: Online
Cost: $340 - $395 , scholarships may be available
Register: HERE
Medicine desperately needs the arts. But artists can be quickly rejected when they don’t understand the culture of medicine and how doctors think. To forestall that quick rejection, doctors also need to understand how artists think.
Our aim is to provide language and visual artists with sufficient understanding of the culture of medicine so that they might interact with physicians and other health professionals to bring the arts into patient care and into the environment of medicine.
We also want to expose health care practitioners to the world of the artist to better understand how to interact with artists to improve patient care and also for their personal benefit. Health care practitioners work within implicit stories that are largely not understood or examined by them. Through engaging with the arts, they can become more aware of these stories and able to reflect upon how they might change their stories to provide better patient care, to nurture themselves, and prevent personal burnout.
Rita Charon of Columbia University has written about the importance of health care practitioners writing stories about their patients and their patient encounters. Some points we will consider:
Poetry and the visual arts provide other means for becoming aware of feelings, beliefs, and biases.
Improved language arts skills help physicians to find the metaphors of their patients’ illnesses.
We will finish the course by inviting participants to write a proposal for how they might bring their art into a health care setting within their communities. We hope that students will present their proposals, and utilize them make a positive contribution to their communities.
Week by Week Course Outline
Week 1: Introduction to the arts in medicine with examples of successful interactions and programs
Week 2: How do doctors think?
Week 3: How do artists think?
Week 4: What are the constraints existing in health care settings that make it hard to introduce the arts?
Week 5: Telling stories about patients – writing fiction and creative non-fiction
Week 6: Poetry and medicine
Week 7: Bringing the Visual Arts into medicine
Week 8: Discussing projects that could be proposed into health care settings in participants’ neighborhoods
Who Should Take This Class
We are interested in attracting artists of all types who want to bring their art into medicine. We also want to attract health care practitioners who are open to the arts and want more exposure to the arts and how they can use the arts in patient care and for their own personal growth and well-being. We hope to create an opportunity for interactions within the live part of the class and also on the discussion board among health care practitioners and artists.
TLAN offers scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color through the Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.
Format
This is a hybrid online class, conducted through Zoom meetings and the online classroom Wet Ink. Zoom meetings are scheduled for 4:30 pm Eastern time on Tuesdays. Sessions will be recorded and made available only to the class.
Online readings and an asynchronous discussion board will be hosted on the online teaching platform Wet Ink. The day before class begins, you will receive an email invitation from Wet Ink. There are no browser requirements, and Wet Ink is mobile-friendly. The Wet Ink platform allows you to log in and complete the coursework on your own time.
You can find out more about this event and register HERE.