Uniting the Pre-Health Humanities with the Introductory Composition Course

Abstract

Drawing on my experiences at a teaching-focused university, I show how locating the health humanities in first-year or introductory composition courses improves learning and offers an economical, flexible, and far-reaching approach to bringing a health humanities education to all baccalaureate-level learners, regardless of whether they aspire to careers in the health professions. In terms of improving learning, health humanities composition courses support the disciplinary aims of both fields. Accessible, relevant issues in the health humanities, such as interventions in health debates or representations of illness and healthcare settings, nourish the cognitive and social conditions needed to develop college-level writing skills. The health humanities' emphases on interdisciplinarity and suspending judgment also inform students' writing abilities. Composition trains students to write rhetorically by considering purpose, context, genre, mode, and other factors when addressing an audience. This approach to writing helps pre-health humanists communicate intentionally and compassionately about health topics as well as the larger issues they call into question. Because students enroll in health humanities composition courses at an early, formative moment in their studies, they are poised to carry or "transfer" their knowledge to other courses, including those that might prepare them for the workforce.

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a “Teaching Subject”: Lessons from the Medical Humanities and Simulation Pedagogy

“…Instead, interdisciplinary affiliations with our own required undergraduate courses may be an effective entryway for facilitating connections between RHM and MH curriculum. For example, Zerbe (2007) and Rubens (2017) both offer examples of health humanities curriculum appropriate for first year composition. Meanwhile, Landau and Thornton (2015) describe two variations of Campbell 23 undergraduate courses in the RHM that fulfilled distribution requirements and enrolled a range of majors.…”