The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a “Teaching Subject”: Lessons from the Medical Humanities and Simulation Pedagogy

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners

“MacGyver-Meets-Dr. Ruth”: Science Journalism and the Material Positioning of Dr. Carla Pugh

This article examines the rhetorical consequences of foregrounding female scientists\u27 materials through an analysis of seven news articles on Dr. Carla Pugh, a surgeon who designs medical patient simulators. Journalists foreground Pugh\u27s materials by positioning her as both “MacGyver,” creatively assembling simulators from everyday objects, and “Dr. Ruth,” willingly discussing intimate parts. These positions avoid focusing on Pugh\u27s personal life or body but still ultimately gender her and her work. The MacGyver position associates Pugh with gendered activities, objects, and spaces while undermining her affiliation with the technical aspects of design. Meanwhile, the Dr. Ruth position implies Pugh\u27s knowledge comes from inherent bodily expertise, making certain scientific fields appear more natural for women

Textual Mediation in Simulated Nursing Handoffs: Examining How Student Writing Coordinates Action

In clinical nursing simulations, a group of students provide care for a robotic patient during a structured scenario. As care is transferred from one group to another, they participate in a patient handoff, with outgoing students passing key information onto incoming students. In healthcare, the nursing handoff is a critical and perilous communication moment that is mediated by a range of participants and texts. Drawing on observations and video recordings of 52 simulation handoffs in the United States, this article examines how two student-designed texts – a collaborative patient chart and individual notes – are leveraged during the handoff. I also consider how handoff talk and writing changes as student nursing knowledge increases over the course of a year. By focusing on textual mediation of the simulated nursing handoff, this article contributes to existing research on professional writing pedagogy and to nursing scholarship on the handoff. Ultimately, it argues that a textual mediation framework can help bridge class room and professional contexts by evaluating student writing not for how successfully it meets a set of imposed criteria but for how effectively it supports classroom activities

Simulation Genres and Student Uptake: The Patient Health Record in Clinical Nursing Simulations

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship to other genres, its role mediating social interactions with the patient and other providers, and its coordination of embodied actions. Connections to students’ experiences with professional genres are addressed throughout. The article concludes by considering initial implications of this research for disciplinary and professional writing courses

Intuition in Healthcare Communication Practices: Initial Findings from a Qualitative Inquiry

This brief paper reports on how healthcare providers negotiate stages of care and communication by using intuition. This focus shifts attention away from the product-patient records-and towards the process of medical communication. To support this claim, the paper presents preliminary findings from qualitative analysis of two individual ethnographic research projects with live-action clinical nursing simulations and emergency medical services. Using a grounded theory analysis that identified intuitive moments in the writing practices of healthcare providers, this brief paper demonstrates how intuition manifests in all five stages of care-anticipate, assess, plan, act and reassess, and document-and grounds medical assessment and decision making. Analysis suggests three takeaways for healthcare communicators and educators: 1. intuitive work supports patient specific and responsive care; 2. coding and highlighting mediate patient sense; and 3. recognizing and valuing patient sense is a learned skill. The paper concludes with suggestions for reflective activities that could support incorporating intuition into healthcare communication pedagogy

Student-designed Texts and Classroom Mediation: A UX Analysis of Clinical Nursing Simulations

This experience report draws on a unique pedagogical contextclinical nursing simulations-to examine how student texts can mediate a classroom exchange. Focusing on 52 student handoffs, I analyze frequency of text use, correlation between text use and student talk, and the impact of a text’s content on its mediating role. This methodology centers student texts and in the process, reimagines possibilities for UX pedagogy and assessment

Co-Constructing Writing Knowledge: Students’ Collaborative Talk Across Contexts

Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program. Our analysis identified two patterns of group conversation among students: “co-telling” and “co-constructing,” with the latter leading to more complex writing knowledge. We also used Beaufort’s domains of writing knowledge to examine how co-constructing conversations supported students in abstracting knowledge beyond a single classroom context and in negotiating local constraints. Our findings suggest that co-constructing is a valuable process that invites students to do the necessary work of remaking their knowledge for local use. Ultimately, our analysis of the role of student conversation in the construction of writing knowledge contributes to our understanding of the myriad activities that surround transfer of learning

Designing Writing for Health and Medicine : Course Arcs, Anchors, and Action

This article details how we developed a hybrid rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication writing course in response to a call for a health sciences writing course. We anticipate that other institutions may be experiencing similar demand for these courses and thus introduce our process and course design as models for meeting this growing curricular need

Pedagogies of Rhetorical Empathy-in-Action: Role Playing and Story Sharing in Healthcare Provider Education

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned