ESH4200 – Narrative Approaches in Medical Education

This course explores medicine and medical education through the lens of storytelling. It starts from the premise that much of how medicine is experienced and understood, from the perspective of both practitioners and patients, can be usefully analysed in terms of the stories people share within and about healthcare settings. We will examine topics including: the role of storytelling in medical communication, the significance of narrative as a way of understanding and experiencing illness and the body, as well as the relationship between story-led approaches and evidence-based medicine.

The course will introduce students to the established field of narrative medicine in clinical practice and draws on work from several disciplines to think about the narrative dimensions of medicine understood broadly. We will ask, for instance, how media narratives influence attitudes towards public health interventions and how political narratives shape perceptions of the connections between health and concepts such as sustainability and economic growth.

Knowledge

A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:

• Account for existing scholarly literature on the place of narrative within medicine;
• Describe other approaches to narrative and their relevance to medicine;
• Account for the narrative dimensions of medical education.

Skills

A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:

• Identify and analyse the narrative dimensions of specific case studies;
• Apply narrative concepts in the design of pedagogical approaches;
• Teach other students to understand the interplay between narrative and related communicative modes in medical contexts.

General competence

A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:

• Cooperate productively with peers from different areas of expertise;
• Present results clearly to a non-expert academic audience;
• Reflect on their own research and dissemination practice.

This course is part of the Honours certificate:

• Honours Certificate in Education for Sustainable Health (honours certificate)

This course is only available for students admitted to this certificate.

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Lectures and seminars. Classes will mainly be held between 16:00-18:00.

Compulsory activities:

• During the course, students work on a creative multimodal project involving visuals and text, and relating to various aspects of narrative covered in the course. The exam assignment is based on this project, which thus must be completed and approved before submitting the final exam.

• 80 % attendance is required to be eligible to take the exam. Attendance will be registered.

Individual written assignment.

All compulsory activities must be approved prior to taking the exam.

Examination and grading at The Faculty of Medicine.