Teaching health sciences students about culturally sensitive communication between health professionals and patients from diverse cultures

Abstract

As members of a nationally accredited research project (I + D+i) InterMED (ref.: FF2011-25500) being carried out in the field of Intercultural Mediation, we are aware of the mediator's delicate role in communicative interactions between health professionals and foreign population. Sales has pointed out the dangers of stereotyping minorities and thus has warned Western citizens ‘to assume that they are unaware of people's reality coming from other cultures, that prejudices are built due to lack of knowledge and the fear that ignorance entails’. For all these reasons, we aim at informing learners enrolled in English for Physical Therapy at the University of Alcalá about the importance that nowadays immigration has in public health settings and the role that mediators play in these contexts. This objective can be attained with the help of class blogs, a web 2.0 tool available at the Blackboard online platform, whose teaching and learning uses are currently being researched by the teaching innovation group FILWIT (Filologías, Wikis y Traducción; Philology, Wikis and Translation) in the framework of the ALCES (Aprendizaje de Lenguas y Cultura en Entornos Sociales; Learning Languages and Culture in Social Networks) project. The interdisciplinary spirit guiding the present teaching experience strives to show that students can learn a foreign language at the same time as they come into contact with multiculturalism in public health services.

Keywords:

• interdisciplinarity
• culture
• mediators
• blog
• collaborative learning