Medical students from the AU/UGA Medical Partnership are no strangers to the museum’s galleries. Through a special gallery program led by Callan Steinmann, the museum’s head of education and curator of academic and public programs, they’re learning useful lessons and skills through art.
Each year, the museum hosts two cohorts of first-year and second-year students in the medical partnership. First-year students focus on visual literacy, critical thinking skills, close looking, careful observation, communication, tolerance of certainty and interpreting images. In their classes, they spend a lot of time learning how to read medical images and understand basic anatomy. At the museum, they engage with objects and learn to use visual-thinking strategies that help them break an image into parts and better understand and interpret it.
The lessons for second-year students focus on empathy, better communication and connection with patients by exploring visual cues and implicit bias. Students also participate in interactive exercises in the galleries. For example, in one program session, students pair up and draw an image based only on the verbal description from their partner. The results often reveal unintentional bias, a reality that these future doctors will need to be aware of when they practice medicine.
Dr. Carrie C. Kelly, the AU/UGA Medical Partnership’s campus lead for humanities in medical education and an assistant professor of pediatrics, said that students enjoy the program and that she believes its lessons will be useful for the students for years to come.