Outside the Frame: Piloting Museum Education at the Emory School of Medicine

Last fall, I piloted a new museum-based elective for medical students. The course was titled Outside the Frame, and my intentions had been just that: to lure students beyond the safe and predictable routine of illness scripts, multiple-choice questions, and pattern recognition we had acclimatized to in our classroom role. In the last year, we had taken all too well to a form of algorithmic reasoning, condemned to simple associations and memorized facts rather than refining our metacognitive approach to complex problems. While this might have served us well on medical exams, we were now on the cusp of transitioning to the clinical phase of our medical careers– an environment rife with uncertainty, cognitive dissonance, and bias landmines. In mirroring such ambiguities, I hoped the museum space would bring to bear some of the creative, critical, and imaginative competencies realistically demanded of clinicians today.

The course took place at the High and Carlos Museums. We employed a range of pedagogical methods, delving beyond the well-established Visual Thinking Strategies of similar medical programs to include didactic guest lectures from Emory faculty, hands-on art activities, and student presentations. As an intersectional space, the museum also allowed us to collaborate with faculty across various disciplines, from art history experts on ancient shamanism to classical Homeric scholars. Every session began with an introduction to the day’s learning objectives and expectations, and concluded with a debrief on key clinical and personal takeaways.

During one such session, students stood before a series of individual portraits painted by Henry Inman, which depicted Native American delegates advocating in America for the preservation of their homelands. We didn’t know this historical context at the time; but piece by piece, as each student contributed their observations and extrapolated narratives from them, we began to constellate thematic connections between what initially seemed like disparate elements. We commented on the muted color scheme, the oblique and even somewhat evasive gazes of the subjects. “They look uncomfortable,” one student said. When we further explored the context of the piece, it was startling to realize how much we’d observed from visual cues alone. It couldn’t have been a comfortable position to be in, we concluded, navigating diplomacy in a country with little legacy of extending such courtesies in its mission to seize and absorb indigenous lands. We spoke at length on how the subjects donned a mix of traditional headdresses, adornments, and embroidery with formal Anglo-European attire, further contributing to this uneasy clash of the personal with the professional.

Following the session, students sat in a close circle with a facilitating clinician-educator and were asked how these portraits resonated with their experience as medical trainees. One student asked, tentative but earnest: “Do you ever stop feeling like it’s all a performance?” The question dovetailed into a fruitful discussion on medical student identity, where others felt empowered to speak up on the internal tensions generated by taking up the responsibility of advocating for patients whilst simultaneously feeling unqualified as a trainee. While the connection was never made explicit, the art became a touchstone on which we could spark dialogues on what it meant to be an advocate, hold contradicting values, and envision oneself through institutional ideologies. To me, the conversation foregrounded how the museum can serve as a pedagogical safe space for students to voice uncertainty and vulnerabilities, allowing them to make sense of their experiences in the context of personal values and the wider professional spheres they inhabit.  

Some may argue that art analysis has little to do with medicine; but departures from convention can also make you more aware of how the convention functions. Each session at the museum left me feeling restored, not in the self-care way of yoga or meditation, which implies a refuge away from the hectic realities of medicine, but rather in that it had actually brought me closer to medicine and deepened my relationship to its craft. As we launch into the next phase of our medical journeys, I hope my peers and I can carry these lessons forward, to prize process over outcome and trust in the inexhaustibility of perspective – in other words, to not just think like physicians, but like artists.

Kain Kim, MD Candidate, Emory University School of Medicine