Blog by Kim Kain
In Hindu tradition, the deity Vishnu periodically descends from the heavens to restore cosmic balance in times of chaos. On a morning in February 2023, in the midst of campus protests across the US centering on the Israel-Palestine crisis, a group of twenty medical school faculty members contemplated a sandstone sculpture of Vishnu.
“It makes me feel helpless,” someone offered. “We can’t always sit around waiting for a god to save us from ourselves.”
“I find it comforting,” another interjected. “That it’s nothing new. Chaos is a human issue—we’ve dealt with it in the past, and we’ll continue to deal with it in the future.”
The faculty sat inside the South Asian exhibit of a local art museum, and the statue of Vishnu they pondered was very old, eleventh century. Yet it helped environ loaded ideas in our contemporary context within a psychologically safe setting.
I lead this interactive workshop on how museums can serve as tools for catalyzing difficult discussions to support faculty in this uncertain time. The workshop was also part of a wider effort to broaden arts-based education at Emory School of Medicine. Participants consisted of a group of faculty members, known as small group advisors, specifically elected to foster professional development for medical students in pre-assigned groups from matriculation to commencement. These advisors serve a heightened purpose in times of political chaos; they are trusted and familiar points of contact for students who may be less likely to reach out to higher levels of administration.
I felt apprehensive, having previously facilitated museum sessions for peers and residents, but not faculty. However, my fears faded in the face of their vulnerability, their desire to ally themselves with students while also feeling unsure of how to safely navigate these conversations. Their response also dissolved the “administration vs. students” divide mounted by mass-email chains and media coverage addressing the crisis across the nation. I had always believed the divide was a reductive binary, and our conversation revealed the nuance I had hoped for.
When the workshop concluded, many participants commented on how the session had alleviated the intimidation that can initially accompany arts-based discussions. They did not need prior knowledge or to decipher some elusive “meaning.” They also felt a weight had been lifted from the session; while we had not necessarily entered with an agenda to cleanse the campus of controversy, the mere admission that this was not something to necessarily “tackle” or “resolve” freed the room to further probe complex topics and debate meaning. We focused on generating questions to ponder as a community instead of individually closing in on premature, unsatisfying answers. As we gained insights into the Vishnu piece, we learned that many of the stories depicted him practicing tolerance and equanimity, not vanquishing evil or exerting force. “It’s strange,” someone noted, “that art about an otherworldly entity seems to get so close to the core of what it means to be human.”
While some may perceive the recent tumultuous campus experiences as disruptive to learners, they represent not intrusions so much as potent magnifications of the daily rifts in our healthcare system. Far from the objective, orderly hierarchy we like to assume medicine to be, everything about the field is wrought from competing priorities, viewpoints, backgrounds, and beliefs. Medical education institutions do have a duty to encourage deeper examination of these rifts by openly honoring the community’s intense diversity. Yet institutional complexity—specific training levels, administrative departments, or other professional divides—makes it all too tempting to compartmentalize diversity initiatives and create barriers to communication.
This experience showed that we can build morale in difficult times, giving hope that we can also communicate effectively about our everyday organizational challenges. The focus was not on the art’s ability to crystallize what is right or wrong, but rather on the learners’ ability to change perspectives as they interact with the art and, most importantly, with one another. In recent years, the use of arts-based methods in medical education has emerged as a promising pedagogical tool to support students through the various challenges of professional development.1 And in the current moment, the museum space relaxes the constraints of personal identity or ideology without dissolving them, allowing individuals to voice their own opinions without feeling beholden to them. Additionally, placing physical distance between learners and their place of work encourages a fuller immersion in the art and fosters collegiality by suspending normal clinical hierarchies.
Investing in museum-based education at the organizational level should not be limited to times of crisis, and can offer a transformative experience for any learner undergoing moments of transition, personal or professional. Explicitly cultivating and naming a space dedicated to reflection helps create a culture of mutual trust, and guaranteeing protected time for such activities demonstrates that institutions value their learners’ wellbeing. Institutions should offer formal faculty workshops on how to design and implement museum education programs, and the good news is that there are already national fellowships, continuing professional development programs, and online repositories of published curricula offering support.2 These tools certainly do not replace the critical work necessary to ensure a safe and trustworthy campus community, but I hope workshops like this one recast the idea of chaos as conditional and not something we must surrender to.
References
[1] Tracy Moniz et al., “How Are the Arts and Humanities Used in Medical Education? Results of a Scoping Review,” Academic Medicine 96, no. 8 (Aug 2021): 1213–22. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000004118
[2] Elizabeth Gaufberg et al., “The Harvard Macy Institute Art Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship: Transformational Faculty Development Through the Arts,” International Review of Psychiatry 35, nos. 7–8 (Nov-Dec 2023): 645–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2023.2283596
Kain Kim is a fourth-year medical student at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.