Ethnography Education to Cultivate Medical Students' Perspectives and Methods for Understanding Others / 医学教育

A class to learn ethnographic approach was provided for medical students in the process of clinical clerkship to cultivate perspectives and methods for understanding people with viewpoints and behaviors that are different from theirs. After attending collaborative lectures and exercises by faculty members who specialized in medical anthropology and medical science, medical students conducted participant observation during clinical clerkship, and shared their field notes with other students. In this process, students learned the importance of situating a person's narratives and behaviors within their social and cultural contexts as well as importance of relativizing themselves. This class is considered to be a method for providing tips to medical students on how to interact with a variety of others. This paper also describes the practice of holding remote classes on this topic during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Collaboration with Nonmedical Researchers / 医学教育

Collaboration with nonmedical researchers offers the potential for members of the Japan Society for Medical Education to enrich their academic and educational activities. Since medical education after ten years needs more nonmedical knowledge, it is necessary to enhance collaboration with nonmedical researchers in more diverse fields. It is possible to consider various ways of collaboration including collaborative research on medical education and collaborative development of educational programs and materials. To promote collaboration, it is necessary to enhance communication between health professionals and nonmedical researchers by constructing a system that allows nonmedical researchers to participate in these activities more easily, by setting up liaison persons within nonmedical disciplines, and by interdisciplinary healthcare education. Collaboration among nonmedical researchers who are interested in medical education is needed as well.

2. The role of anthropological approaches in health and welfare education / 医学教育

  The first role of anthropology in health and welfare education is to provide and cultivate viewpoints for understanding other cultures, including cultural relativism and holism, which is considered to be the basis of cultural competence. Second, this paper deals with legitimate peripheral participation as an example of the theoretical contributions of anthropology to medical, health, and welfare education. Third, ethnography, the method used in anthropology, has a further potential to be applied to qualitative studies of health and welfare. Constructive dialogue between anthropologists and medical specialists should be promoted to consider health and welfare education in the future.