Education and Museum: Cultural Heritage and learning

Project description supported by Erasmus Plus KA2- The project proposal is connected to the promotion of initiatives, starting in primary school, for using ICT, the open educational resources and digital resources of cultural heritage for the improvement science learning. The experience and result

Art and Medicine: from anatomic studies to Visual Thinking Strategies

Over the centuries the collaboration between artists and doctors and the relationship between art and medicine disciplines have been documented. Since the '60s the discipline of medical humanities has been developed in order to enrich the studies in medical sciences with the humanities. In the belief that medicine is more than just a set of knowledge and technical skills, medical educators have considered important to include the humanities as art, literature, philosophy, ethics, history, in the curriculum of training a good doctor. Despite there are examples of previous use of art as part of the curricula of medicine as a tool to develop the cognitive skills of observation and description, there is a general consensus that the semiotic competence starts from a correct and deep observation, "clinical eye", using senses to diagnose disease. It can talk about "Visual Thinking Strategy" (VTS) in this context. The VTS provides a way to enable the observation of the work of art, the process of analysis, comparison and discussion with others that allows the medical student to acquire a method to be applied also in clinical activity, improving skills in patient examination, by implementing the problem solving and critical thinking, getting used to teamwork, stimulating empathy toward patient and respect for others (whether patient or colleague). The observation practice should be key thing for medical training and this theory can be an aid to improve clinical skills. A trial of VTS for medicine students connected to Semiotic Course in collaboration with the Galleria Borghese in Rome during last academic year was carried out at The Degree Course in Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of Sapienza University.Keywords:Medical humanities, art, Visual Thinking StrategiesIntroductionArt understood as 'Tèchne' could be described as the application of rules set and experiences elaborated by man, therefore the knowledge, in order to make objects or to depict images taken from reality or fantasy world. Medical Science is a discipline defined as Art in so far as it able to apply the knowledge, therefore the Science of the disease cure. Over the centuries these disciplines have developed many relationships, in fact, we have document of the cooperation between artists and doctors. Let’s think , in Classical Antiquity, when artists could learn anatomical features only through the observation of athletes in gymnasium. Anatomical features, still unknown to the doctors, who could not use, for example, the dissection of corpse because this practice was prohibited for religious reasons. They were able to “admire” the representation of muscles stretching through sculpture, an example is Myron's Discobolus.In Medicine field only Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus, in the third century B.C. carried out dissections of "live" human bodies (1) until 1241 when Federico II promulgated the edict that authorized and stimulated the use of cadavers by doctors. In 1316 Mondino de Liuzzi wrote "Anothomia" founding the first School of Human Anatomy in Europe. It will have to wait the Renaissance, with the birth of the "modern" medicine, to discover that also the artists were able to use the human bodies for their anatomical studies. The first known example was Il Pollaiolo www.sensesandsciences.co

L'arte e la Medicina: la cura nell'arte

L'arte per la formazione del Medico e del personale di cur

The Cultural Heritage to improve skills and to create a bridge between school and museum

Cultural heritage education can provide information in different fields due to different ways one can use to approach them, depending on the context: given its nature, it can in fact represent both object of study, meaning and aim. This means that cultural heritage allows for a multidisciplinary approach, being related to several aspects of human life. This is a fundamental feature when it is employed in the school environment. Starting from these assumptions, we present the project Observing artwork as a form of education for learning and citizenship, started in the school year 2015/2016. This project has proposed a practice allowing for the use of cultural heritage within classrooms as a multidisciplinary learning tool, by means of the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. VTS focus on the learner, placing him at the centre of the learning process. The student, by means of his knowledge and experiences, constructs the meaning of image represented by an artwork, cooperating with his classmates, aiming at learning to learn. Hence, it is a method that addresses the needs of the application of the constructivist theory in the learning environment. In order to bring cultural heritage inside classrooms, educational activities are carried out using digital resources, such as visual artworks repositories, and technological devices, like interactive whiteboards displaying pictures employed for the VTS practice

Learning through Art in Medical Education

Medical Humanities approach is becoming an important action in the health curriculum. Art can play a central role in the training of care staff for the development of skills and for the humanization of the therapeutic path. The application of art as a tool for learning and its historical relationship with medicine can be a valid support for the development of skills such as observation, active listening, problem solving and empathy, useful for improving the profession and the relationship with the patient. It is possible to rediscover the link between art, medicine, and care to help health professionals to improve their activities and resilience. Particular methods such as that of the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) can help health students and professionals to become better actors in the care context

The visual art as a learning tool in medical education

The literature has identified promising findings regarding the application of methodology using visual art to develop the cognitive skill of observation and description to enhance critical thinking among medical students. This longitudinal controlled quasi-experimental study aims to demonstrate that Visual Thinking Strategies method and other art activities are effective in improving and maintaining the ability to observe, describe and critically interpret artistic or medical images in undergraduate medical students. The course of art and medicine was given at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th year at the same cohort of students within the curriculum of Medicine and Surgery of Sapienza University of Rome and a baseline pre-post assessment was performed using a validated rubric to score a written test on observation and interpretation of paintings and clinical images. All the students increased their score from pre to post-test in the 3rd year, but only the students attending the electives during the 4th and 5th year maintained their ability to observe, describe and critically interpret. Our findings suggest that The Visual Thinking Strategies, as arts-based learning activities, are an effective methodology to increase the professional abilities of medical students but if our findings are coherent with what is already known about the effectiveness of the observation of fine arts to increase clinical visual skills but it needs persistence of these activities. Therefore they should be added to medical curricula as a mandatory component

Arte e Medicina dagli studi anatomici alla Visual Thinking Strategy

L'utilizzo dell'arte per lo sviluppo di competenze di base in ambito medic

The green granary of the Empire? Insights into olive agroforestry in Sicily (Italy) from the Roman past and the present

Groves with ancient olive trees (Olea europaea L.) could be considered remnants of old agroforestry systems. Anything but static, these agro-ecosystems have undergone drastic transformational processes in Mediterranean countries, where abandonment or intensification have been observed far more than continuity, expansion or renaissance, leading to environmental degradation of rural areas. Starting from this assumption and inspired by historical ecology and historical geography, we consider centuries-old olive trees as living archives of human-nature interactions and are thus proxies of past agroforestry. Our aim is to better understand what has driven dynamics of change and persistence, happening today as well as in the past. We first travel backward in time, looking at the ecology of land management systems during the Roman period (ca 200 BC-400 AD) and late Antiquity (ca AD 400-700). The special focus is the island of Sicily, the granary of the Empire, well known as a region where cereal production increased around the latifundia economy. We reconstruct the diversity of land tenure and the ecology of such complex systems, by combining records from Roman agriculturalists and palaeoenvironmental evidence of the past. We then zoom out, to look at today’s management practices in olive groves, thus drawing a parallel between Antiquity and today. Our work provides valuable insights into the correlation between certain organisation models, ecological strategies and adaptation capacity over the long term, clearly showing that human and nature dimensions are interconnected. Such entanglement may be a key element for ensuring these agroecosystems resilience. All elements that may contribute to the re-invention of sustainable forms of their management, for the present and the future

L’Arte dell’osservazione, dall’opera artistica alla diagnosi Le prime esperienze in Sapienza Università di Roma, a Medicina e Chirurgia

This study describes how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) as a methodological practice can help medical students learn and acquire analytical ability. This ability, capable of improving observational acumen and generally acquired only after years of clinical experience, may be achieved also by recourse to the systematic and reasoned examination of the visual arts, in particular paintings. Students attending the third year Medicine and Surgery degree-course, within the ambit of the faculty’s integrated medical-scientific and humanities teaching-learning activities, followed an elective course which began with a preparatory-explanatory lecture on the analytical methodologies applied to the study of art, followed by a practical workshop held at Rome’s Galleria Borghese and ended with a third and final lecture where the students themselves provided the teachers who conducted the course with direct feedback regarding the three phases of the course. The students’ appraisal of the experiences was positive; the experiment is on-going and has been extended to embrace other courses held by the Sapienza University. Further observations are needed at present to validate the effectiveness to medical training of this kind of course in the long term, even though the limited number of experiments carried out in other countries, whose historical and artistic heritages are undoubtedly not so rich as Italy’s, attest to their undeniable usefulness to students of medicine and surgery at both analytical and, no less important, humanistic-educational level