The Harvard Macy Institute Art Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship: Transformational faculty development through the arts

Abstract

Museum-based education for health professionals can lead to a variety of important learning outcomes within the domain of skills development, personal insight, perspective-taking and social advocacy. The Harvard Macy Institute’s Art Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship was designed to develop faculty expertise in art museum-based practices, encourage scholarship, and cultivate a cohesive and supportive community of educators. The Fellowship was piloted from January to May 2019 with twelve interprofessional Fellows. Two in-person experiential sessions were held at Boston-area museums with intervening virtual learning. Fellows were introduced to a variety of approaches used in art museum-based education and developed a project for implementation at their home institution. A qualitative formative evaluation assessed immediate and 6-month post-Fellowship outcomes. Outcomes are reported in four categories: (1) Fellows’ personal and professional development; (2) Institutional projects and curriculum development; (3) Community of practice and scholarly advancement of the field; and (4) Development of Fellowship model. A follow-up survey was performed four years after the conclusion of the pilot year, documenting Fellows’ significant accomplishments in museum-based education, reflections on the Fellowship and thoughts on the future of the field.

Keywords:

• Museum Based Education
• Health Professions Education
• Medical Education
• professional development
• visual arts
• medical humanities
• health humanities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the 2019 Fellows, as well as Elizabeth Armstrong, Brooke DiGiovanni Evans, Todd Fowler, Sandra Gold, Holly Gooding, Ellen Hedstrom, Judy Murray, Subha Ramani and Shari Tishman.

Ethical approval

CHA’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) determined that the Fellowship evaluation did not constitute generalizable research, and that the evaluation activities thus did not require IRB review.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The pilot-year MBE-HP Fellowship and evaluation was funded through participant tuition, with additional financial and/or in-kind support from the Cambridge Health Alliance Center for Professional and Academic Development, the Sandra and Arnold Gold Humanism Research Fund, the Harvard Medical School Arts and Humanities Initiative, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.