Looking and Listening with Learners: Art Museums in Medical Education

Sara G. Shields, MD, MS, FAAFP

An art museum may not seem like a setting for medical education, but many medical training programs are starting to incorporate art observation into their curriculums. The UMass Family Medicine (FM) Residency has partnered with the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) since 2013 to train its residents in the art of observation, communication, and teamwork, and UMass medical students have long been visiting WAM as part of electives in the humanities or professionalism and lifelong learning.

The goal in bringing medical learners to a museum is not to make them into art historians, but to teach important skills for physicians to gain, outside the usual hospital or clinic setting. Being in an art museum allows students and residents to practice close observation, thoughtful communication, non-judgmental listening, and critical thinking skills, while encouraging them to develop a tolerance for ambiguity. The quiet, light, and space at WAM – in contrast to the noise and hubbub of hospital or medical office settings – offer an environment in which these skills can flourish, making it a unique learning space.

When Hugh Silk, MD, MHA and I were first developing the UMass FM humanities curriculum, we presented our work at a family medicine conference and were partnered with a residency program from New Jersey that was focusing on art as a topic in medical humanities. This program took residents on a yearly trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and used a specific teaching method called visual thinking strategies (VTS) to guide residents through looking at art together. The VTS format – with facilitators guiding a group through three standard questions about an artwork – is a natural fit for adult learning in reinforcing curiosity, deeper observation, and close listening to others’ observations, all of which match goals for medical learners. Dr. Silk and I immediately realized both the value of this approach in medical teaching and the natural fit with our amazing local museum, so we started talking with WAM about incorporating visual art observation into our humanities program. We met with the now-retired WAM director Jim Welu, who had been teaching art observation with medical students intermittently for years and shared some of his favorite methods with us as we started our program.

As is true for our entire FM residency curriculum, we have invited and responded to resident feedback about our approaches, with the curriculum thus evolving over the years. With the guidance of our then-associate residency director and medical humanities expert Sherrilyn Sethi, we moved from somewhat unplanned visits once a year to a more deliberate wellness-inspired curriculum, with specific artworks used to guide the WAM docents (some of whom are retired physicians themselves) in planning tours. We began incorporating more free time for the residents to explore the museum’s galleries themselves and then share what they found with their colleagues. We were also able to use WAM’s studios for residents to be creative with watercolor, clay modeling, and pastels. In recent years, as curricular time has shifted, we come once a year to WAM with our incoming interns and use the site to introduce our full humanities curriculum with writing exercises as well as gallery observation time using the VTS framework.

One of my favorite moments with residents over the years in the museum involved a group of second-year residents from the Family Health Center of Worcester,

Looking and Listening with Learners Continued

where I have been on the faculty since 1995. While looking together at Winslow Homer’s The Gale, this group (which included some who themselves were mothers of young children) began discussing how this painting might remind them of different mothers they have seen in their practice and how society defines and judges “good” mothering. With another group, we had a similarly profound discussion of the multiple emotions of pregnancy while observing Otto Dix’s The Pregnant Woman, a painting showing a nude pregnant person in the late stage of pregnancy with their face hidden, challenging observers with its frank and depersonalized depiction.

My own role at WAM has also evolved as part of this teaching. In 2018, the timing was right for me to take the nine-month docent training course that WAM was offering, allowing me to dig deeper and learn from both the museum curators and my fellow docents (some of whom are amazing art historians) in ways that could enrich my own teaching. While the clinical demands of the pandemic prevented me from participating fully in docent work, I now focus on bringing medical groups and participating as much as I can.

UMass students also continue to visit WAM as part of different curricular options. Students taking an optional enrichment elective called Art for the Physician have come for tours each of the last two fall semesters. I teach annually in Dr. Frank Domino’s Leadership and Professionalism elective for fourth-year medical students and other groups at the medical school have organized tours during student wellness electives throughout the school year. In Dr. Domino’s course, we have done both virtual and in-person art observation sessions. I especially appreciate taking students in these sessions to the Renaissance Courtyard at WAM, where we start by simply enjoying the space and light and then move to looking at the powerful large wall mural, These Days of Maiuma. Its complexity of images and objects begs close observation and inspires ongoing speculation about its meaning. Every time I take a group to see this work, I enjoy observing the moment when they recognize how it is related to the permanent mosaic collection, and I relish in learning every time someone knows about art that I have not previously noted or known. As is often true in medical education, the teacher learns from the learners in the art museum as well! +

Sara G. Shields, MD, MS, FAAFP Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health

Director of Inpatient Perinatal Services for FMCH UMass Chan Medical School Family Health Center of Worcester