Type of Teaching Material: Lesson Plan/Discussion Outline

Accessible Narrative Medicine digital library

The Accessible Narrative Medicine digital library includes outlines for narrative medicine workshops, as well as "third objects" (poems, short essays, stories, images, items that can be the catalyst for conversation, reflection, and writing). The goal of the site is to encourage the practice of narrative medicine in a wide range of community settings by making available detailed workshop outlines and resources that can be adapted by community workshop facilitators for their particular audience and setting. The developers of the site believe that "narrative medicine workshops should be led by trusted members of a community. In order to create an inclusive safe space, the content and leadership of a workshop should reflect the lived experience of those attending." The outlines and materials focus on the health narratives of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and persons living with disability. Registration is required to access the materials; once registered, site users can find workshops on core narrative medicine ideals, including attention, witness, and re-presentation. The library of third objects is searchable by topic and genre and includes not only written works but also images and art. The site has secured permission for use of narratives and many of the third objects include a bio for the author/artist, as well as a downloadable PDF of the object.

Worlds Apart Facilitator’s Guide

This is a thorough facilitator’s guide on how to facilitate class discussions on the cross-cultural healthcare documentary Worlds Apart (a detailed summary can be found in the Search for Stories tab). In brief, Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience, including a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer, a Lao woman with a hole in her heart, a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant, and a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression. This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive. The facilitator's guide provides background on the filmmakers and their intentions. It includes suggestions for facilitators such as setting ground rules for discussion and asking students to jot down notes during the documentary. The four-part narrative-driven documentary is summarized, and then each section is broken down in great detail, so even someone who did not watch the film could understand the exact circumstances of each family and individual being featured. After each synopsis we also receive medical background information and a variety of discussion questions specifically tailored to different issues discussed in the stories. Each section has a separate “focus” also outlined, ranging from language barriers to explanatory modules to informed consent to racial/ethnic healthcare disparities to non-adherence to medications. This guide was created “to give health care professionals an engaging experience through which to explore ideas about cross-cultural issues in health care and to learn from the actual experiences of both patients and clinicians,” but could also easily be adapted to a university classroom setting to guide student discussions. The guide does not include any assignments, but any of the issues headlining the discussion topics could work well as research essay prompts.

Honoring and Witnessing Stories

This is an outline for a 90 minute undergraduate class on narrative medicine. It draws on readings by Arthur Frank and Rita Charon to talk about the importance of patient stories for patients to make sense of illness and for health care providers to provide care. It also addresses the importance of witnessing stories as a means of addressing power inequalities and health disparities. In addition to excerpts from classic works by Frank and Charon, the class session incorporates essays by a medical student (Ali) and a practicing physician (McMullen) on the significance of stories in their practice. The outline is from a practicum class, and so the class session includes narrative medicine practices of close reading and reflective writing, as well as class discussion of the assigned readings.

Class outline for teaching Parsons’ Sick Role

Outline for a 60 minute lecture/discussion on Talcott Parsons' concept of "the sick role." Arguments for the significance of patient voice and narrative (e.g., Arthur Frank's Wounded Storyteller) often take Parson's sick role as a point of contrast. Likewise, the practice of narrative medicine by physicians is a rejection of the paternalistic and objective physician that is the counterpart to the "sick patient" in Parson's analysis. The outline is from an upper-division undergraduate course on health narratives offered in a department of Rhetoric & Media Studies (the course also enrolls students studying sociology, English, and pre-health). The class outline provides a very brief background to Parsons' larger project, goes into some detail about the elements of the sick role and the corresponding role of the physician. The session ends with discussion questions about the implications of this concept.

Fifty-five word stories: “Small jewels” for personal reflection and teaching

Fifty-five word stories are brief pieces of creative writing that use elements of poetry, prose, or both to encapsulate key experiences in health care. In this article, family physician Colleen Fogarty describes how she has used 55-word stories in a seminar she led at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). The article includes a table with instructions on how to write a 55-word story, a description of her seminar and tips on how she taught it, and examples of writing and reactions from the faculty in family medicine residency programs who participated in her seminar. The article is available free of charge in PubMed.