Character and virtue development in medical learners: another role for the arts?

Abstract

Medical education serves to teach students how to think and act as future physicians. Doing so successfully requires supporting learners’ acquisition of clinical skills and knowledge, but also attending to their character education and virtue development. The arts and humanities are widely embraced as a fundamental component of a complete medical education. While not frequently touted as a useful pedagogical tool for teaching character and virtue, we argue the integration of arts-based activities into medical education can promote virtue development. In this article, we use the virtues framework from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham to review existing empirical studies of arts-based programs for each of these virtue domains of intellectual, moral, civic, and performance virtues. Learners may benefit from further exploration—both conceptual and empirical—of how the arts can scaffold character development in medical education.

Keywords:

• Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues
• intellectual virtues
• civic virtues
• performance virtues
• moral virtues
• humanities

Acknowledgements

Dr. Chisolm is the Director of the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing, through which her work is supported.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).