Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review

Background The articulation of learning goals, processes and outcomes related to health humanities teaching currently lacks comparability of curricula and outcomes, and requires synthesis to provide a basis for developing a curriculum and evaluation framework for health humanities teaching and learning. This scoping review sought to answer how and why the health humanities are used in health professions education. It also sought to explore how health humanities curricula are evaluated and whether the programme evaluation aligns with the desired learning outcomes. Methods A focused scoping review of qualitative and mixed-methods studies that included the influence of integrated health humanities curricula in pre-registration health professions education with programme evaluate of outcomes was completed. Studies of students not enrolled in a pre-registration course, with only ad-hoc health humanities learning experiences that were not assessed or evaluated were excluded. Four databases were searched (CINAHL), (ERIC), PubMed, and Medline. Results The search over a 5 year period, identified 8621 publications. Title and abstract screening, followed by full-text screening, resulted in 24 articles selected for inclusion. Learning outcomes, learning activities and evaluation data were extracted from each included publication. Discussion Reported health humanities curricula focused on developing students’ capacity for perspective, reflexivity, self- reflection and person-centred approaches to communication. However, the learning outcomes were not consistently described, identifying a limited capacity to compare health humanities curricula across programmes. A set of clearly stated generic capabilities or outcomes from learning in health humanities would be a helpful next step for benchmarking, clarification and comparison of evaluation strategy

Biography from below : Herbert Kruckman - a forgotten man of American art

Biography is a genre that has been largely dedicated to 'eminent' lives, yet there is a need to re-evaluate the grounds of biographical eligibility to encompass 'forgotten' and other marginalised lives. BIOGRAPHY FROM BELOW: HERBERT KRUCKMAN -A FORGOTTEN MAN OF AMERICAN ART is a study of one such unrecognised figure, the New York-born artist, cartoonist, illustrator, teacher and author, Herbert Kruckman (1904-98). Throughout his career, Kruckman's works addressed the poverty of the Great Depression, civil rights, workers' rights, European fascism and the perils of capitalism. This is exemplified by his numerous satirical cartoons in left-wing magazines such as New Masses, the Hat Worker and controversial books such as HoI' Up Yo' Head (1936). Kruckman, as a painter, was a key contributor to 1930s American Social Expressionism, yet a reluctance to exhibit and other acts of self-sabotage, along with shifts in the postwar aesthetic and political landscapes of America, hindered his career. By incorporating traditional biography with elements of social history and art history, this thesis is an original study of Kruckman, an artist whose works spanned the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, McCarthyism and the Cold War. This thesis is divided into two interrelated studies: PART ONE: BIOGRAPHY FROM BELOW and PART Two: HERBERT KRUCKMAN -A FORGOTTEN MAN OF AMERICAN ART. The first part comprises a brief study of 'biography from below', which makes the case for using biography to uncover and examine what Virginia Woolf described as 'obscure' lives. This is followed by a historical survey of the biography of the artist as subgenre, which argues that the status of the artist is intertwined with biographical recognition and representation. Part One concludes with a brief introduction to the study of the biographical historiography of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), which underpins the second and major part of this thesis, Kruckman's biography. The need for a biography of Kruckman is not based solely on his artistic and political contributions. In addition to using biography as a means of exposing a 'forgotten' life, it employs the genre to examine from 'below' the single largest government-sponsored art movement in American history, the WPA/FAP, providing an insight into the experience of a 'typical' New Deal artist working through America's worst financial and social crisis, the Great Depression. Given that there are very few biographical studies of New Deal artists, especially its unknown or forgotten figures, this thesis seeks to make an original contribution to American history and art history through its detailed and extensive research ofan unknown artist. Moreover, this thesis provides a threefold contribution to biography: the first in terms of the addition of a new subject into written discourse; the second in the expansion of the boundaries of biographical eligibility through the introduction a new type of subject; and the third through its demonstration of how biography can be used to examine a social, political, and artistic movement. The broad aims of this thesis are to rescue Herbert Kruckman's life from what E.P Thompson once called the"enormous condescension of posterity", and, equally importantly, to demonstrate the salience of biography as a form of historical enquiry, a lens onto a neglected moment in the social and biographical history of American art