Art of Engagement Lab Goes to Lyon, France
The visual arts have become increasingly recognized as a useful tool for teaching critical skills to health care providers in the United States. As the work of the Center for Visual Arts in Healthcare at BWH has shown, museum-based art education can provide medical trainees and practitioners the ability to observe more carefully, be more precise in their communication, and have opportunities to reflect on their professional identities in the neutral setting that museums provide. Our programs in the Art of Engagement lab, currently housed at the Jefferson Einstein Center for Humanism, use similar principles and objectives, with an additional emphasis on art making. Our team was recently invited to France to share our curriculum with medical students at the University of Lyon.
N. Moghbeli, Rupture
I have been fortunate to cultivate dual careers in medicine and art, and to use the intersection of these professions to inform my work in medical education. My art practice is based out of my Philadelphia art studio, where I create large scale works on paper using traditional Iranian calligraphy materials, including ink and beveled bamboo tools (www.nmoghbeli.com). I started the Art of Engagement lab in 2015 during my sabbatical year in Paris, France. While there, I connected with medical students at Descartes University in Paris, who asked me to bring museum-based workshops to their medical school. I worked with the founders of Danaecare Lab, an organization dedicated to supporting healthcare providers in France, to create a program, and launched the program at the medical school in Lyon in 2017-2018. The pandemic forced a pause to these in-person activities, so I adapted the work to a zoom platform and began to include more exercises in drawing, in a series entitled Drawing to Decompress. My aim was to help participants start and sustain their own creative practice as a means of finding respite during the pandemic.
In March 2024, we completed our second international collaboration. Professors from the University of Lyon Medical School, with leadership and support from Professor Gilles Rode and the Danaecare lab, extended an invitation to share the Art of Engagement programming with French medical and pharmacy students. I was joined by Jefferson Medical student and Center for Humanism Fellow, Elizabeth Upton. We spent two weeks in France learning about the existing French medical humanities programs, the majority of which are literature based. The rest of our time was spent planning and executing our workshop programming for the French medical students. We partnered with lead curator and art educator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, Jean-Christophe Stuccilli, in selecting the pieces and co-leading the exercises.
Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon
During a 10 day period, we held two three hour workshops at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. Exercises were selected to teach intentional observation, evidence based interpretation, careful communication, and reflection on the challenges and successes that we experience in our profession. Examples of exercises included “back to back drawing”, during which one person is seated facing an artwork (observer), and describes the work to their partner (drawer), whose back is to the painting. The person who is not facing the painting is tasked with drawing the elements described by the observer, and must do their best to create a “copy” of the painting without ever seeing it. One student commented: “The most important thing I learned was that the manner in which I say something is not always understood. One can make a lot of connections with medicine, like when a consultant has to explain really technical things to a patient. It’s always important to verify that the patient understood what was described to them, maybe by having them repeat it in their own words.” Other students compared this exercise to patient handoffs, citing the importance of careful attention to detail and even word choice when describing a patient to a colleague.
Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon
Our program was embedded in an existing medical humanities program, housed within le Collège des Humanités et Sciences Sociales. In France, medical education begins directly after high school without an intermediate undergraduate education. This direct transition into medical school underscores the need for comprehensive and well-rounded education within the medical curriculum itself, and the University of Lyon has built a robust medical humanities program to serve this purpose. Our program expanded their existing roster of offerings by introducing visual arts based sessions for the first time. The remaining two workshops sessions took place via zoom, with an emphasis on drawing skills and the creation of a regular art practice. We had wonderful feedback from students about these sessions, and have been invited to integrate into their medical humanities curriculum on a regular basis moving forward. “This program was a breath of fresh air from the stressful work of being a medical student.” All of the participants stated that they would recommend this workshop to their colleagues.
Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon
The collaboration was rich in its exchange of ideas between their team and ours, and we left with strong professional and personal ties to many people in their community of healthcare professionals and trainees. We believe that having future international programming will allow us to learn from our colleagues in other countries, and in this process become better doctors and more balanced human beings.
Nazanin Moghbeli, MD, FACC, MPH
Director of the Cardiac Care Unit at Einstein Medical Center and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Jefferson Medical College