The University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix is partnering with the Phoenix Art Museum to combine arts and medicine through a workshop designed to give students a new perspective on their work.
Five sessions are set up throughout the school year at the museum and several more are planned at the school for students to hone their observational skills by examining artwork. Cynthia Standley, a professor in UA’s Department of Bioethics and Medical Humanism, said that the sessions are meant to build up skills surrounding description, questioning and bias.
“It’s really taking the skills that they learned in their doctoring courses, which is where they learn the clinical skills, and applying them in a different context, getting them out of their comfort zone to dig a little bit deeper,” Standley said.
These clinical skills are then mixed with creative thinking to accomplish different tasks when looking at the art, such as developing a social media profile for a person painted in a scene based on context clues from the art.
“This program is designed to help you be better medical (practitioners), using art as a tool to slow down, to observe, and to be okay with the ambiguity of not knowing what’s going to happen and to work on some communication outside your daily coursework,” said Kaela Hoskings, education director at the Phoenix Art Museum and leader of the workshops.
Hoskings said each session is meant to be different enough that students at the UA medical school can attend multiple workshops and get something new out of each one.
“We preach that art has this power to educate and connect, and this is a very tangible connection and a different access point,” she said. “The things that are successful and aren’t, I tweak it for the next group.”
This program has been training students for four years, but officials hope to continue its expansion to reach more students.
“Each year we try to expand the program and pick up the pace,” Standley said. “We’re hoping by word of mouth the program will spread and continue to grow.
Contact the reporter at ckmccror@asu.edu.
