AHSE: Storytelling as a Communication Exercise for Health Professionals

Speaker: John McKenzie, Director of Educational Development, Division of Academic Innovation

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”  

This well-known story is attributed to Ernest Hemingway, who won a bet that he could tell a compelling story in only six words. 

We all have stories, and stories are well understood as playing a major role in memory formation. Stories, then, can play a critical role in enhancing student learning. In this session, we will discuss the role of storytelling in medical and health sciences education. We will include specific exercises you can implement in the classroom. 

Stories in education cultivate reflexivity – the practice of understanding ourselves as members of social worlds and investigating ourselves as cocreators of knowledge. They also cultivate vulnerability – allowing us to feel, be moved, and recognize our own vulnerability alongside the vulnerability of others. And finally, they help crystallize our experiences into claims about what these experiences mean. 

You will be given tools in this session to enhance your own classroom storytelling, as well as prompts to invite your students to engage in storytelling that makes a difference in how they understand what they have learned and experienced. 

Please register for the event by September 20. After registering for the event, we recommend that you add the event to your calendar through the calendar options below.