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Students use art to convey what words cannot
NUR460 is a second-year, clinically focused course that deals with persistent illness across various settings where students are challenged to think about nursing practice outside of the usual intellectual and cognitive frameworks of the nursing curriculum. In this course, students have the option of completing an arts-based project where they work with materials dealing with form, colour and rhythm in ways that reflect the human experience they encounter in their practice. They discuss suffering and embodiment – how suffering is experienced in the body, how patients and their families cope, and how challenging it is to work in such environments. They then create an art piece.
“The focus is not on artistic quality, but rather what they can capture through the arts that cannot be captured in words or in technical language,” says senior lecturer, Francine Wynn. Students have painted, quilted, composed music and poetry, made sculptures, and choreographed dance. The artworks are presented to the class and a discussion follows.
Teaching NUR460 for the first time was an eye-opening experience for Bloomberg Nursing PhD candidate and course instructor Craig Dale. “Issues of legitimacy and accountability make complexity a significant project for second-year BScN students,” he says. He points out that being able to actively respond to the situated concerns of patients and their families becomes an essential part of seminar discussion. “Students often struggle to find the right words and actions, but this final assignment moves beyond the confines of language,” he says. “This is a very exciting conclusion to the course and it shows in the students’ work.”
Below is a photo gallery of selected artworks by the Fall 2011 class.
Posted January 30, 2012
