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See link on agenda 4-27-1

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Which one is us

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https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm

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Medicine is defined as the art and science of healing. Today globally, science has largely overridden the art part of healing. In India, entrance to medical schools is based entirely on tests based on scientific facts and concepts with a little of logical/critical thinking - areas handled by the left side of the brain.

Our medical curriculum requires hours of drudgery in trying to remember facts and figures. Almost no medical school in India lays any emphasis on art in medical curriculum. The right side of the brain is concerned with fine arts including imagery, poetry and drawing. As someone said "medical school attracts those who are of left brain, but then proceeds to atrophy what is left of their right brain".

Unlike physics or chemistry, medicine is not a pure science. Medicine is largely an applied science and it requires certain skills that are developed by observation, practice and experience - similar to the arts more than science. It can be said that medicine is science when it is used to study disease but becomes an art when it is used to practice healing.

While medicine has a long and distinguished history of caring and comforting, the scientific basis of medicine is recent. That medicine is a science is nevertheless the popular belief, and this has been reinforced by the advent of 'evidence-based medicine'. Scientific truths are not true for all times, unlike truths in the field of the arts. In art there is no right or wrong but only a perspective or a point of view, whereas in medicine one being right or wrong is life determining.

Ideas on causation, diagnosis and management of diseases change with passage of time and advent of new technology or understanding. Even in a given time, one medical practitioner may have a genuinely different opinion of diagnosis and treatment about a particular case with respect to another colleague based on his or her experience and expertise.

With progress of science and its application, there has been a rapid decline in the human element of health care provision. The current technological advances have worsened this divide. The art of clinical medicine is dying in the present set-up with high-tech gadgets. The recent upsurge of doctors being abused and manhandled especially in casualties and emergencies is a consequence of this.

This is occurring not because of their lack of scientific knowledge but is related to their insensitive behaviour which emanates from their ignorance as well as inability to handle the emotional distress of sick individuals and their near and dear ones. Doctors should not allow scientific medicine to blunt their humanity, ignore ethics and the need for empathy.

A typical consultation today is of less than ten minutes and consists of a few cursory questions followed by a long list of investigations and medicines to be taken with poor explanation of whys and hows. Genuine doctor-patient relationships do not exist any longer. In early seventies, when the Framingham Heart study in United States subjects were being recruited through their doctors, most of them opined that while their own physician was a good one, others were no good - clearly an impossible phenomenon! Today in India even that is unlikely. Doctor-patient trust is at its lowest and doctor shopping is blatantly practised.

All doctor-patient interactions, whether these are in a hospital or in the community, require a caring attitude from the doctor coupled with communication. Today science has given doctors far more ammunition than ever before to fight disease, but the repeated bombarding has made them deafer than ever and they can no longer hear the cries of their patients. A good clinician is one who is armed with scientific knowledge, practices using clinical judgment, compassion and understanding.

In India, we need to reverse the pendulum that has swung fully to the science from the art side in medicine. An infusion of arts in medical education might be the solution to this all pervasive deafness of medical professionals. Many medical educationists have argued that art and literature should have a place in the medical curriculum because art helps doctors to understand experiences, illness and human values and that art itself can fulfill a therapeutic role.

This kind of education can help doctors grapple with the kinds of existential questions that they expect their patients to answer and that they themselves may not be equipped to answer. All medical colleges usually have a cinema and literary club. They do little to promote either cinema or literature. There is a need to go beyond these tokenisms and aim for some structural changes in medical education in India.

It is time the Medical Council of India or its newer avatar considers inclusion of arts in the medical curriculum from first year itself. The importance of humanities in medical education is being realised across the globe and steps are being taken to introduce it in medical schools. India should not be left behind.

Today patients in India are being squeezed between incompetence on one side (thanks to a floundering medical education industry) and corruption on the other (thanks to a commission culture set up by drug and investigative industry); and from the top by arrogance of medical professionals. Instilling empathy among medical practitioners may be the best way to start addressing all these malpractices jointly.

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Why doctors need humanities: Including it in medical education is the best way to bring back humanism to the profession

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Medicine is defined as the art and science of healing. Today globally, science has largely overridden the art part of healing. In India, entrance to medical schools is based entirely on tests based on scientific facts and concepts with a little of logical/critical thinking - areas handled by the left side of the brain.

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resource bank on STEAM

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We've streamlined our integration with Schoology, making it easier to install and use the OER Commons LTI App. Installation from the Scho...

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Resource bank on Humanities

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We've streamlined our integration with Schoology, making it easier to install and use the OER Commons LTI App. Installation from the Scho...

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"The humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic—a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support."

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What's the point of the humanities? Of studying philosophy, history, literature and "soft" sciences like psychology and poly sci? The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, consisting of academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, tries to answer this question in a big new report to Congress. The report is intended to counter plunging enrollment in and support for the humanities, which are increasingly viewed as "luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford," as The New York Times put it.

Titled "The Heart of the Matter," the report states: "As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic-a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support."

I find this a bit grandiose, and obscure. I have my own humble defense of the humanities, which I came up with a couple of years ago, when I started teaching a new course required for all freshmen at Stevens Institute of Technology. The syllabus includes Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Keynes, Eliot-you know, Greatest Hits of Western Civilization.

I love teaching the class, but I don't assume that students love taking it. So on the first day of class I ask my wary-looking students, "How many of you would skip this class if it wasn't required?" After I assure them that they won't hurt my feelings, almost all raise their hands.

When I ask what the problem is, they say they came to Stevens for engineering, computer science, physics, pre-med, finance, digital music production, etc. They don't see the point of reading all this old impractical stuff that has nothing to do with their careers. When I ask them to guess why Stevens inflicts this course on them, someone usually says, smirking, To make us well-rounded.

Whenever I get the "well-rounded" response, I want to reply, "Does 'well-rounded' mean, like, chubby?" But I don't want to offend overweight students. Instead I say, "I don't really know what 'well-rounded' means. Does it mean being able chitchat about Shakespeare at cocktail parties? I don't care about that." Then I give them my pitch for the course, which goes something like this:

We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that's fine. I became a science writer because I think science is the most exciting, dynamic, consequential part of human culture, and I wanted to be a part of that. Also, I have two college-age kids, and I'd be thrilled if they pursued careers in science, engineering or medicine. I certainly want them to learn as much science and math as they can, because those skills can help you get a great job.

But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, "This is how things are." They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.

The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we're learning more every day.

But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves. They also tell us that every single human is unique, different than every other human, and each of us keeps changing in unpredictable ways. The societies we live in also keep changing--in part because of science and technology! So in certain important ways, humans resist the kind of explanations that science gives us.

The humanities are more about questions than answers, and we're going to wrestle with some ridiculously big questions in this class. Like, What is truth anyway? How do we know something is true? Or rather, why do we believe certain things are true and other things aren't? Also, how do we decide whether something is wrong or right to do, for us personally or for society as a whole?

Also, what is the meaning of life? What is the point of life? Should happiness be our goal? Well, what the hell is happiness? And should happiness be an end in itself or just a side effect of some other more important goal? Like gaining knowledge, or reducing suffering?

Each of you has to find your own answer to these questions. Socrates, one of the philosophers we're going to read, said wisdom means knowing how little you know. Socrates was a pompous ass, but there is wisdom in what he says about wisdom.

If I do my job, by the end of this course you'll question all authorities, including me. You'll question what you've been told about the nature of reality, about the purpose of life, about what it means to be a good person. Because that, for me, is the point of the humanities: they keep us from being trapped by our own desire for certainty.

Postscript: My Stevens colleague Garry Dobbins, a philosopher, likes to give me a hard time, and I him, but I'm always provoked by his take on things, like this response to my post: "As to the Humanities being to teach us a healthy skepticism, we might all agree that this is indeed one of the consequences of such an education; but if this is necessary, as you make it out, because learning science alone we do not learn the importance, or necessity of 'uncertainty, doubt and skepticism,' something strange and even perverse has befallen the study of science! Those taking seriously the study of the history of science, for instance, will know that there was a time when science assumed the cultural pre-eminence it still occupies among us precisely because it did not teach dogmas, or as you put it, 'certainty.' On the contrary; scientific studies from the early modern period down to the early twentieth century, anyway, were liberal studies. Surely the justification of study of the Humanities, history, literature, philosophy and the rest, is not fundamentally different than the justification for the study of science. There are forces at work in human life, whether material or spiritual, which we seek to master, so far as possible. The language in which we express our knowledge of physical forces obeys somewhat different logical rules to that in which we express our knowledge of economics for example: but this doesn't mean that the one is less knowledge, or logical, or important, than the other, surely! That you speak of the kind of knowledge to be gained by close study of Shakespeare, Thucydides, or Plato, as 'impractical' surely goes to show a misunderstanding as to what is practical in a human life. Unless you can show good reason to believe Socrates mistaken in thinking that self-knowledge is only reliable foundation for a good life."

I responded: "Garry, you're right that science if properly taught should incorporate skepticism. But science is becomingly increasingly dogmatic and arrogant in our era, which is why we need the humanities to foster a healthy anti-dogmatism."

Post-postscript: Hear me yammer further about the humanities (and other topics) with my buddy George Johnson (also a humanities major) on a recent Bloggingheads.tv: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/19616?in=58:19&out=61:16.
Painting by 18th century painter Nicholas Guibal, Wikimedia Commons.

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Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen

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What's the point of the humanities? Of studying philosophy, history, literature and "soft" sciences like psychology and poly sci? The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, consisting of academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, tries to answer this question in a big new report to Congress.

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STREAM? How many damn acronyms do we need? 

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STREAM? How many damn acronyms do we need? 

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-furman/stem-needs-updated-to-str_b_5461814.html

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Geometry, Arcitecture, Graphic Design, Writing Inspiration - something for everyone with Escher's drawings.
http://www.crystalinks.com/escher.html

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"Inspired by kids and grounded in research, Novel Engineering is an innovative approach to integrate engineering and literacy in elementary and middle school.

Students use existing classroom literature - stories, novels, and expository texts - as the basis for engineering design challenges that help them identify problems, design realistic solutions, and engage in the Engineering Design Process while reinforcing their literacy skills."

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Students use existing classroom literature - stories, novels, and expository texts - as the basis for engineering design challenges that help them identify problems, design realistic solutions, and engage in the Engineering Design Process while reinforcing their literacy skills.

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https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/03/31/1639208/why-americas-obsession-with-stem-education-is-dangerous

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Check out text for the essence of initiative planning - -consider how to add the "A" for ARTS

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Part I. Why STEM?

Chapter 1. The Tipping Point

Chapter 2. The 21st Century Learning Environment

Chapter 3. Clearing the Path

Chapter 4. The Achievement Gap

Chapter 5. Special Populations

Chapter 6. The Shift Begins Within a Leader

Chapter 7. Entering the STEM Shift

Chapter 8. Planning the Shift

Chapter 9. STEM Curriculum Shifting

Chapter 10. Developing Capacity: STEM-Centric Professional Development

Chapter 11. Time for STEM

Chapter 12. STEM Collaborations and Trust

Chapter 13. A Call to Action

Appendix: A Checklist for Evaluating the Quality of the Planning Process

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Part I. Why STEM? Chapter 1. The Tipping Point Chapter 2. The 21st Century Learning Environment Chapter 3. Clearing the Path Chapter 4. The Achievement Gap Chapter 5. Special Populations Chapter 6. The Shift Begins Within a Leader Chapter 7. Entering the STEM Shift Chapter 8. Planning the Shift Chapter 9.

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Listen to my interview with the Apollo School founders (transcript):
We've reached a point where most teachers embrace the idea of student-directed learning, the philosophy of being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. We can also appreciate the value of cross-curricular studies, blending math and science, for example, or integrating arts and music into history class. So why are so many teachers still using the same old model, where we plan and deliver lessons in separate subjects, in lock step, using the same traditional schedule as we always have?

Two reasons, I think.

One, because it works, more or less. We move students through the system, they learn some stuff, pass tests, and graduate with an acceptable repertoire of knowledge and skills. Acceptable. Enough to function, to continue on to college and survive, more or less.

Except that lately, more and more voices are telling us that this repertoire of knowledge and skills isn't quite cutting it. Students aren't quite as adept at problem-solving and collaboration and inquiry as they need to be for the 21st century.

The other reason we stick to the traditional framework is the one I believe is more powerful: It's because we don't know how to change. We have no template for what school could look like if we restructured it to reflect priorities like cross-curricular connections, student self-efficacy, and inquiry-based learning.

Well, I have a template for you today, and I can't wait to show it to you.

Welcome to the Apollo School

The Apollo School is a program that operates inside a regular public school, Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania. Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes-English, social studies, and art-all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas.

Students set their own goals for each day based on whatever project they happen to be working on at the time: This includes independent and group work, one-on-one appointments with teachers, and attending optional, self-selected mini lessons taught by the teachers. By lunch time, when the Apollo block is over, students resume a regular schedule for the rest of the day.

How the Program Started

Apollo began when Greg Wimmer, a social studies teacher, and English teacher Wes Ward (pictured above), started playing around with the idea of combining their two classes. "Every time I would teach a piece of literature," said Ward, "I'd find myself talking about history. And I thought how convenient it would be-and really beneficial to the students-if they could have a history buff here to really challenge and push the kids to dig up more context of the poetry or stories we were reading."

Meanwhile, their school district was already shifting its whole instructional paradigm. Embracing an approach called mass customized learning, Central York School District was looking for ways to personalize the learning experience for every student. This approach was influenced by the work of Bea McGarvey and Charles Schwahn in their visionary book Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning: Learning in the Age of Empowerment.

This video explores that district-wide shift:

With encouragement from their principal, Wimmer and Ward joined forces with Jim Grandi, Central York's art teacher, and the Apollo School was born. They gave a presentation to prospective students the semester before the course started, and interested students in grades 11 and 12 enrolled voluntarily.

Central York still offers traditionally taught English, social studies, and art classes. This choice is all part of the variety offered by mass customized learning. "We have some courses that run in a hybrid format where they may meet with a teacher for a little bit but then be working independently or in groups, and then they're meeting back with the teacher again," explains Ward. "We have online courses where students check in once a week with a teacher, but the rest of the work is done online. So mass customized learning isn't necessarily Apollo. Apollo is one spoke of that wheel."

Course Requirements: Curriculum and Assessment

Over the course of a semester, Apollo students are required to complete four independent projects within a given theme, each of which must include some element of English, social studies, and art. Students are given a list of the required standards in every subject, and they are expected to meet each of these by the end of the semester.

"Since you have 40 students running in 40 different directions," Wimmer explains, "we decided they were the ones that needed to self-select the standards."

Ward describes how the process works. "At the start of every project, we have the students kind of designate which standards they're going to work towards, either showing mastery of or just practicing to get better at. Unlike most classrooms where the teacher is drawing up the lesson plans based on standards that are some invisible thing under lock and key, we actually share PDF files of all three of our subject area standards with students. They have them all semester long, so they're constantly aware of the expectations from each of us and what they're supposed to be mastering."

How students meet these standards is entirely their decision, and the road is not always smooth. "It's really genius to see them a week into their project realize that they're hitting the wrong standards," Wimmer says, "and then they go back and are able to change them and make the standards work for them."

When a project is completed, students meet with all three teachers in a setting not unlike the defense of a doctoral dissertation: They discuss goals, process, and outcomes, and explain exactly how they met each learning target. Students are also assessed on how well they met four thinking skills-reasoning, perspective, contextualization and synthesis-and two "soft skills"-communication and time management.

The whole group meets at the beginning of each day in Family Time.

A Typical Day

Each day starts with Family Time. "Around 7:45 we kind of corral them together into Greg's room and we call that Family Time," says Grandi. The length of that meeting can vary dramatically, from five-minute housekeeping sessions to hours-long conversations. "We've had full-on one hour to two-hour discussions where they're really generating the conversation and driving the topic about their own education. Those can be completely organic in that sense, and really rewarding."

Students use online software to plan out how they will use the four hours, in 30-minute blocks of time. This time might include independent research, creative work, group work, or one-on-one conferences students schedule with the teachers as needed.

Students meet with social studies teacher Greg Wimmer. Using an online form, students schedule one-on-one conferences with teachers as needed.

They are free to travel between the art room, which functions as a kind of makerspace, Wimmer's classroom, which students typically use for small group meetings, and Ward's room, which is often used as a quiet space for students to work alone.

"They can also go to our library or sit at one of the tables that's around our school and in extreme situations," Ward says, "they might even leave the school to go interview somebody in the community or to go shadow somebody in a certain career. We really try to push them beyond that normal setting."

Each student decides how to use Apollo's four-hour block of time. At the end of each project, time management is part of their final assessment.

Mini-Lessons

Another option students have in that four hour block of time is attending mini-lessons. Rather than teaching whole classes the same lesson at the same time, the teachers plan and teach optional mini-lessons within their subject areas. Some lessons cover basic content areas that meet certain standards, but most are delivered only after teachers see a need within the scope of what students are working on.

Optional. Did you catch that? Students are not required to attend mini-lessons; they choose to go based on their current needs. During family time, the teachers will advertise the lessons they are teaching that day.

"It's kind of like going to an education conference and having that smorgasbord of possibilities to choose from," Ward explains. "So it's entirely possible that Greg would be teaching a lesson about this particular conflict or this issue in current events. And Mr. Grandi might be offering an art lesson at the same time that I'm offering something in English, and the students get to pick and choose which one is more beneficial to them in their project at that point in time. We can turn around and offer the same lesson the next day, and they can switch and go to the other one, if need be."

The customization doesn't stop with the teachers: Students can also request mini-lessons on specific topics. Grandi recently had a student request a lesson on Frida Kahlo and other artists inspired by her. "So I said, 'Yeah, just give me two or three days to put that together and then I'll have that lesson for you.'"

Some mini-lessons are even taught by the students themselves. "Every student usually has something they can add to the group," Wimmer says. We have some students that are extremely good at technology, some who are good at building an online presence, and so we thought, why not have those students share their abilities and talents with one another?"

Art teacher Jim Grandi conferences with a student. Each student project includes an element of English, social studies, and art.

Positive Outcomes

When asked whether the program has produced the results they'd hoped for, Grandi says students go far beyond what they'd be able to do in a more traditional program. "When I'm teaching traditional classes, I try my hardest to plan really interesting lessons and projects for the kids to do. But I can't plan these projects. I could never plan a bioethics project for the whole class. I couldn't even hit all of the standards that I wanted to it. This way, (students) hit more standards as a class than I would ever have them hit if I was directing every single lesson."

Academics aside, the program has allowed teachers to develop the kind of relationships with students that just wouldn't be possible in a regular setting. "We've had some of these young adults come up to us and just ... things I've never even thought I would hear," Grandi says, "about how they would be scared to death to come to school Sunday night from anxiety, and how they love coming to school now, and they never have had conversations with adults or their teachers before, more than just, 'Here's your homework, here's your test.' We have real conversations with these people, I mean, these are people. The relationships you build are amazing." ♦

Learn More About the Apollo School

Website: theapolloschool.weebly.com

Instagram: @apollocyhs

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The Apollo School: What 21st Century Learning Looks Like

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Listen to my interview with the Apollo School founders (transcript): We've reached a point where most teachers embrace the idea of student-directed learning, the philosophy of being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.

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Cool stuff and a video

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Humanities Institute :: University at Buffalo ::

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Since its founding in 2005, the University at Buffalo's Humanities Institute (HI) has quickly established itself as one of the most important entities supporting the humanities in Western New York. Scholarship in the humanities helps us to question, comprehend, and transform an increasingly complex world.

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STEMedia.org | STEM•Media | Creative x Inspirational Content for the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Community!

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E4U3 Mega Engineering | Future Cities with Intelligent Infrastructure [STEM Poetry] - Nehemiah Mabry

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STEMedia.org | STEM*Media | Creative x Inspirational Content for the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Community! Performed by Dr. Nehemiah J. Mabry, this video was awarded the People's Choice and Best Overall Video for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) MEGA ENGINEERING Video Contest. Thumbs up 👍 if you like!

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See a series of short videos

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The Art and Art History Department offers courses of study in the history of art, the practice of studio art, and film and media studies. The undergraduate program is designed to help students think critically about the visual arts and visual culture. The courses focus on the meaning of images and media, and their historical development, roles in society, and relationships to disciplines other such as literature, music, and philosophy.
View the Art & Art History brochure.

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The Art and Art History Department offers courses of study in the history of art, the practice of studio art, and film and media studies. The undergraduate program is designed to help students think critically about the visual arts and visual culture.

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Explore the meaning of Humanities and the "A" in STEAM