Hope in Medicine: Dr. Meg Chisholm and Dr. Khalid Elzamzamy - Visual Thinking Strategies
In this episode of the Hippocratic Society Podcast, Dr. Meg Chisholm, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a certified Visual Thinking Strategies facilitator, joins Dr. Khalid ElZamzamy, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins. Together, they explore how art can deepen reflection, strengthen community, and support the cultivation of virtue in medicine.
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Transcript
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Hi, and welcome to the Hippocratic Society Podcast. In this series of episodes, we break
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from our usual content to share presentations from the second annual Hippocratic Society
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Conference, during which physicians, trainees, and students from across our chapters came
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together to reflect on what it means to live out the virtue of hope in medicine. We hope
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you enjoy.
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Wonderful. So I'd like yeah, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our speakers, one of whom you already know, and the other two some of you have met already, but I'd like to give a formal introduction to Dr. Meg Chisholm. Meg is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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She's a certified visual thinking strategies facilitator and coach, and serves as director of the Palma Q program for human flourishing. Dr. Chisham is a senior advisor for Hippocratic Society, she is on our board, and she is the faculty sponsor for the Johns Hopkins chapter.
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Similarly, Khaled El Zamzami is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on how cultural and religious factors shape mental health and on the role of ethics and spirituality in psychiatric care. He is active in national efforts to support the mental health needs of the American Muslim community, and he is a faculty sponsor for the Johns Hopkins chapter and also on our board of advisors.
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They are joined today by the student leader of the Johns Hopkins chapter, Maria Morcos. She is a finishing up her first year in medical school, and before medical school was a PA. So please give a warm welcome to these three.
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Thank you so much for staying and being part of this community. I really appreciate the invitation to talk more about the way that we can cultivate virtues through art.
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So these are our learning objectives. I'm not going to belabor that for the sake of time, but
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I will want to say that College's going to lead an introductory large group discussion, after which I'll provide some context for our workshop nationally, national context. And then Khalid will lead a personal responses tour so you can all experience it. And after which I'll share more about personal responses tour as a pedagogical method and best practices. Then Marie is going to lead an online version of the personal responses tour, and we'll conclude with some reflections.
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reflection and discussion around how you might incorporate personal response tours into your chapter meetings. With that, I'll turn it over to Colin.
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To start by tapping into our collective experience, facilitating chapter meetings. We have our beautiful curriculum with the different virtues. We have the case studies, we have the definitions, we have the the how to foster the virtues in in in in in in clinical practice. I'm curious to hear from all of you here, maybe f a couple of chapters here. What is your typical structure format and how you how you use this curriculum and how do how does your session how is your session, your meeting structured very briefly.
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And one thing, highlight one thing that maybe works well, one thing that is maybe difficult or awkward, one thing that engages students more than other activities in your in your kind of format, in your structure. So I'd like to hear from maybe two or three chapters. We have five or s five to seven minutes for this section. Just run us through the typical format and highlight one thing that goes well, doesn't go very well, where students are more engaged than others. Any takers? All right.
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Hello everyone. my name is Zach Tentor. I just finished M1 at the University of Florida. and I've also had the privilege to be part of Hippocratic Society up in Boston. So I feel like I have like multiple different experiences. But at UF, we have actually I would say like a pretty long time for dinner, about like an hour where we just have dinner. The cases are like on the table, but I feel like people just talk to each other, not even about the case.
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And I find that this was a little bit different in like in Boston. I feel like things were definitely more like like just shorter time. So I feel like we have more time for community, which I think is very important. then during our like chapter meeting, like after we have dinner, we kind of all come together and talk. we read the case first, obviously, and then the like leader talks about the definition that is provided.
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By Hippocratic Society, and then we kind of open it up to the floor. I would say we're also blessed to have a lot of good like faculty support, especially Dr. Lynch and other other members, but we rely on them a lot for like just asking questions about like how ought we to respond in this case and other like similar cases. so I think
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I've definitely appreciated kind of the longer time for dinner because I think that builds community just outside of you know, talking about the case itself that we do at UF. So it's more community time and then the discussion is centered around the case it seems. other chapters, one or two more experiences.
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howdy, this is Dominic from the Duke chapter. I've been with the chapter for some time now and we're really lucky to have seen it grown so much. We actually follow a very similar schedule where we have about an hour just to enjoy company and food. and that's really effective. Is actually the hardest part is transitioning to the case of like, you know, it's been on the table the whole time. the other thing that I would say is successful is actually having multiple breakout sessions. We're lucky enough to have
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the you know need often to have two or three tables with different leaders leading and so that gives capacity to give like new students the training to be comfortable leading these discussions. as well as then also kind of having like a slightly different flavor. So you kind of come back at the end of the the night and maybe just a little bit from each table we'll share what y'all had talked about. And that definitely just kinda gives a sense of, well, we had radically different experiences discussing the same exact case. I think that's really interesting.
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But allows that kind of smaller bits of community to form around, you know, a more intimate, you know rather than twenty people around a table, kind of, you know, ten people is I think a lot more engaging.
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jealous of these one hour dinners. Ours is like 10, 15 minutes and we are on to the case. So in addition to what Zach mentioned, I think the small group component is is is something that kind of some chapters have have attempted. one more chapter, perhaps one more? I've seen I've seen your hand up earlier. No, I I was going to emphasize the same the importance of a communal meal.
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It breaks the ice, newcomers, people get to know each other and and get to know each other names, backgrounds. And actually sharing starts thoughts and ideas around the communal meal. I think it's important to not have it for fifteen minutes.
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So I think this is a very helpful context for us to kind of introduce a tool that we have integrated in our chapter meetings that you can integrate potentially at at some point in your meetings. So this is what Dr. Chism is gonna walk us through, and we're gonna have some time to apply it as well.
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Okay, so I think we're all here because we're committed to the Hippocratic Society's mission to form and sustain clinicians. We're united by this conviction that the cultivation of these virtues is central to the formation of physicians capable of pursuing these ends.
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Yet contemporary educational approaches often struggle to translate these virtues into concrete, teachable, and learnable practices, leaving virtue education abstract or detached from personal experiences. So we're addressing this challenge with using the wonderful case-based curriculum into which integration of arts-based pedagogy can offer a formational approach that's well suited to orienting learners toward the inherent purpose of medicine. And as I mentioned,
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For those of you who were either there, not there Friday night, or couldn't hear or see. If you've seen that masterclass video with John Ree and Brewer Eberly on third things, you know that the works of art can function as these third things. Again, that's a term that was coined by the educator Parker Palmer, and they are shared objects that hold moral, emotional, and existential complexity and invite attentive presence, interpretation, and dialogue.
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without immediate judgment or instrumental aims. So engaging with works of art together enables learners to practice habits essential to virtue formation, attentiveness.
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Interpretive humility, openness to meaning, and tolerance for ambiguity. These are capacities and others it builds that shape moral perception and support a stable orientation towards the good amidst uncertainty and suffering. And this is a paper about the third things. There are many papers about it, but this is one.
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Despite increasing interest in the arts as resources for character and virtue formation, many Hippocratic faculty society faculty and student leaders really have limited access to practical, really accessible methods for implementing arts-based learning in their own educational contexts. This interactive workshop addresses that gap. We're introducing and modeling the Personal Responses Tour. It's low cost, it's adaptable.
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And it's an arts-based learning activity that we've used successfully as well as others have used successfully with medical learners for over 15 years. The Personal Responses Tour invites participants to engage works of art through guided reflection and shared dialogue, fostering community, moral imagination, and virtues that orient clinicians towards the true ends of medical practice. So this is a
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image of what the personal responses tour might look like in a museum. You'll see on the left of the slide that there's a basket with lots of unique individual prompts. You Marie, you want to show we have some of these kind of prompts that we'll pass around.
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And each student draws a prompt out of the basket and then they tour the gallery by themselves to find a work of art that responds to this specific prompt that they've
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They've chosen randomly. And then after they've found their work of art, we reconvene. And as a small group, or sometimes even a larger group, we tour the gallery together, and then when we get to the work of art they selected, they read their prompt, they talk about the connection. So that's the classic personal responses tour.
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It was initially developed as I for use in museums, but it can also take place in homes, in classrooms and virtual settings. And we've used it regularly to build community among our attendees at Hopkins. and I'm gonna we're gonna show you how we've done it. So Colin?
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The same way you walked into the room today, you found cards with images on your tables. This is how students walk into the hip socks meetings, you'll find these image cards on the tables. so what we start is with a with a prompt, and in this case the prompt is the same prompt, is a uniform prompt for all the participants here in the audience. This is how we do it in our Hippocratic Society meetings. And the prompt for us today is select a card with an image that connects to what being a physician means to you. So take
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couple minutes to to pick a card from your table. If you don't find a card that's very satisfactory, you can move on to your neighbour's table and pick up a different card. And then in eight minutes, share your card with your colleagues on the table and the connection with with the card and what it means to be a physician.
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Or right. We'll come back together. I'm curious how many how many chapters in the past have facilitated the meeting on what it means to be a physician? How how many chapters have facilitated the meeting on what it means to be a physician in the past? So a a few a few a few chapters. Some take going back to d that meeting or imagining yourself facilitating a future meeting on what it means to be a physician, you want us to kind of
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Debrief together and kind of reflect on these two main questions here. How did the use of art influence your response to the prompt, what it means to be a physician, and how would you have responded if asked without the art to say what what being a physician means to you? Any any thoughts?
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Hello everyone, I'm Angela from UCI, Irvine School of Medicine. and it's I really enjoy this exercise. Art is not something that we currently use in our chapter, but I think incorporating it would be a great idea. So using art influences my response because I feel like it
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forces us to think outside of the box to readjust our perspective, to readjust our interpretation, to connect things that we usually wouldn't with art and with medicine and with humanism. So I really appreciate all the exercises and, you know, even on the first day when we were all interpreting the art piece together.
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Yeah, Chris Lasante from Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio. And we did the physician one and I'll have to admit I'm I'm into like, you know, the objective good, the
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you know, Aristotelian understanding of of medicine, it's the end of health, let's define health, and very, very, you know, I'm a speech and debate coach. And so it's all very verbal and and that and you know, defining our terms and that sort of thing, and get into that philosophical stuff. But then presented with these pictures here, basically I I kind of glommed onto the two little boys looking at the sunset basically, because as a diagnostic radiologist, I feel like I'm I'm a alongside my practicing clinic
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clinicians basically. And so that really helped remind me in a different way of the relational aspect of what I do specifically as a radiologist, coming alongside the clinicians. And hopefully we're seeing something beautiful happen as we as we're looking at the sunset, but something beautiful happening as we as we bring healing and and compassionate care to our patients. So this was this was fun. And the radiologist I'll take that as a as a as a as a good praise for using images in in in facility in facilitator
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meetings. I appreciate you sharing that. More more more thoughts? How did how did the use of art facilitate the conversation for you?
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Hi, Sophia from Not Yet a Chapter at the University of Chicago. I've really appreciated this weekend how we've approached in such an integrated manner the virtue of hope in the human person, specifically the integration of the intellect with affectivity and with the petitive dimensions of the person. And I think that
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Art is such a way to evoke that unity because in front of something beautiful and provocative, the whole person is moved. And when the judgment is born from a heart that's moved, then it's more likely to bring along with it the the whole person and not just our commitments to certain ideas as true as those commitments and those ideas may be.
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then the words and the definitions more evocative kind of responses and emotions bringing the whole person into the conversation perhaps through these third things things. Other other thoughts? Yes.
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Good morning. I actually I have to leave a little bit early because I've got a flight out. but the picture that I chose was just of a scene from what looks like an open air market in any developing country in South America, Africa. and the reason was that when I did my first medical mission, I did it for selfish reasons, because I had trained
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in club flip and pallet surgery, but knew I would not be doing that in my own practice because it wasn't academic, it wasn't in a major major city. So this was my way of being able to use some of my training. and that first mission actually sealed the deal for me because I I realized, number one, that we are so privileged in our medical
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arena here in this country with all its flaws and and faults, it's still incredible. and the need overseas was so dire. And I came back with the sense that I had just gotten so much more back than I ever gave in terms of of what I was able to accomplish. And it was one of those things that just kept you going back over and over again. So it really and instilled in the second question about, you know, without the art, what it means to be a physician. And for me it's been an absolute privilege. I I look back on my career.
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many of you are looking forward to your future careers. But I think that probably one of the best things that life can bring to you is a sense of contentment when you reach the end of that road where you've you've done done the career and you can look back and say, yeah, I would I would do it all over again if I had the the the choice and the chance to do that.
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What more? What more thoughts, reflections, go all the way to the back, that's okay.
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Thank you. I'm Simone from the University of Nevada, Reno. I chose this piece that represents a sailor navigating the waves of the sea at sunset. And to me how I would use this piece to answer the question what it means to be a physician.
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Is that it seems like to me, even though I'm not a clinician, I'm an undergraduate student, that medicine itself can be very chaotic and that you're helping patients navigate this time in their life with with great uncertainty and chaos. And so you're serving as a guide and someone who's accompanying them and helping them find their way and chart their path across this across this sea of uncertainty. And so I think what it means to be a physician is to serve with humility and to guide.
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and to allow and to help cross and to help serve in this way.
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The use of art helped you anchor that notion of uncertainty and and and chaos in medicine perhaps in ways perhaps would not be as easy to express, maybe just with with with words.
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Thoughts? Take maybe one one or two more. I like that word anchor that you just used because what was clear to me is that the art very quickly and naturally brought up both the particular and the universal.
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Our group was talking about mushrooms and skydiving, but also these like really high level aspirations that we have about our practice and I don't think I would have learned those things about our colleagues here at the table without these pictures.
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prompt opens up windows and opportunities to explore themes that otherwise couldn't have been accessible perhaps. So with that, congratulations you completed your first PRT activity. And with that, Dr. Chisholm is going to walk us through how to facilitate what are the principles.
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Thanks. I also think they're you know, this can bring some metacognitive awareness as to how we approach problems, right? And so some people have a clear idea in their mind of what be you know, what being a physician means to them and then they search out an object to match that, and other people just intuitively find an object that they are connecting with and they're not really sure why, and then they kind of
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Then try to find a connection to what being a physician means. So it's also an opportunity to kind of examine how we're or illuminate how we're thinking and how we approach problems. So really appreciate that you participated in that. We I don't like you know, there's been such lofty descriptions of this. Sophia, you know, you were so articulate about describing this. So I don't like to use the term as icebreaker, but this is you know basically what we do at the beginning. We've got a lot of new people that come in to
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The group and so it's a way of people introducing themselves, people getting to know one another a little bit. Even if you've known somebody for a while, sometimes you can learn something new about them because they connect to a piece that you know they might have a musical instrument in it, and it might tell you about something from their childhood with a relative that played an instrument or something. So there these things can be discovered about other people through the art.
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So as I said earlier, this is a really adaptable arts-based activity. I'm going to describe some best practices and successful adaptations of how we've used it in different settings. So we've talked about the museum setting. So we're going to talk about a couple of different things. We're going to talk about not only variations in the setting, but also variations in the prompts and the activ the kind of details of the activity itself.
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so here we've used these laminated cards, which I've used for over a decade. they're expensive for three sets. That's basically what we used, although some people have kept cards, so they're a little less than I had ten years ago. But it's about $300 for these sets, but I would suggest that it's a really great investment. you could also get postcards, you know, from a museum or
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some a place like that. but these laminate cards really endure.
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I think the ones in the museum are usually less diverse. This has such a variety of images, and obviously less durable. But the advantage of getting cards from a museum is you can pick them to specifically align with sort of ideas about virtues or flourishing. But we've used these to explore students' connections, not only to what it means to be a physician, but also to explore specific virtues. And it opens up kind of, you know, we get to hear what the students think about this virtue, what their definition.
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might be, and then we dive into the Aristotelian definitions and that kinds of things. But there's lots of options for prompts.
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As I said, you know, in the real-life art museum or even in the classroom setting or home setting, you could use these pre-prepared prompts that are unique. in that case, again, each person gets to draw a unique prompt. as you see from the ones that we Maria distributed on the tables, we can tailor those to be whatever on whatever topic we would like. we usually let
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students keep them as a memento afterwards. And I still have the one from my first personal responses tour that I did in a museum.
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The other thing we've done is we've had you can get these decks, card decks of virtues or values. Some of them are labeled. I've got about three different sets of those, and you can have them pick a unique virtue from the card deck and talk about that as well, either in a museum or home or classroom.
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As I said, after selecting the prompts, participants are given 10 minutes in the museum and then they spend time connecting as a group about the prompts and their selections.
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I would say something we didn't really model here. It's important for you as a leader to also be a participant. I suggest not being the first one to go because I I think it's nice to have students be hospitable and let's generous and let students go first. But after two or three students, I usually think it's nice for a faculty member to model, perhaps modeling more vulnerability or modeling maybe going for something less.
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concrete, more abstract.
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again you can get the unique prompt
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Like we or the shared prompt like we did here. we've also done variations for something called an introductory personal responses tour, where we've had we've given everybody the same prompt, which is find a work of art that you connect to. They have a partner that they've paired with. So this is great for a community-building exercise, maybe at the beginning of the year. and then they share their connection to their work of art with a
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Partner and then they introduce their partner to the larger group. So that builds also, you know, skills of kind of listening and kind of generously offering the gift of a description of someone else. We've also had them find select a work of a piece of music that they found particularly
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Nourishing or you know, you could use any kind of prompt. and then they've selected that, they f then they are not told in advance what the next step is, but then they're told that they're going to find a work of art, either in the museum or it could be here on a on a card, find a work that connects to that piece of music and what the connection is. So there are all kinds of ways that you can make variations, not only in the setting but in the kind of prompts and the kind of
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kind of activities that you design depending on what your objectives are.
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So these are just a few overall best practices, again, that you need to design the activity to align with your learning objectives. I think it's really helpful to create very open ended prompts to stimulate personal reflection. We usually paraphrase after somebody has described what the connection is just to demonstrate that we have kind of understood and have listened carefully to what they've said, and also to make sure everybody else has heard. And just like in the visual thinking.
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strategies exercise, we might link related responses, even if they differ. Okay, you know, you're thinking about this side of being a physician, you're thinking about, you know, this side of being a physician, just to build community. And we ideally the
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Faculty, if you're doing this in a museum in a small group or in a home or classroom in a small group, we like to have at least one faculty member for about every 15 students just to keep it kind of feeling psychologically safe for people to disclose some personal aspects of themselves.
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So going back to our initial kind of question about different chapters and how we run our respective meetings, we start every single meeting of ours with with a personal responses tour, a visual thinking strategies activity. and as as you saw here, we are using it to define the virtue from different people's perspectives and then create our own kind of collective definition of hope. And after that we might introduce some of the definitions we have in the curriculum and then transition to some case based discussions. so kind of taking it thinking about now.
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Returning back to our home institutions and our chapters, what is one version of this activity that you could realistically you know implement pilot in some of your upcoming meetings? What supports do you do you need to make it happen? what obstacles do you anticipate and any kind of general questions? So from here for the next 10-15 minutes, we'll just open it up for questions, thoughts, reflections, next steps.
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Start us off? Yeah. I'll be running back and forth.
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Lisa Ehrlich from here from Houston. I I was thinking you you guys probably saw the murals that are down here. So Houston, we have the amazing art amazing museums here. but even like in Durham, there's murals all all down really cool stuff. And that would be kind of something interesting of you know, walking tour, maybe with one prompt and murals knowing when they were, you know, painted and in what context.
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That's really a great suggestion. We so we do use murals in our work with students, not necessarily with the hip sock groups yet, but we've used murals. We've actually used hospital art. We've had s we've set up like sort of scavenger hunts of for that people had to do in the hospital, you know, find a work of art that represents
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you know, generosity or courage or things like that. So we'd have a whole list and then we'd come back together and people would share because they'd take photos of the art and then we come back together and they'd share what they found. so there's all kinds you don't have to go to museums. so definitely you can use murals and yeah Houston has an amazing amazing mural street art community so it's beautiful.
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I wanted to comment that what I love about that mural suggestion and going through hospital art is that it it automatically fosters this sense of shared ownership for the good of a particular place that you feel tied to and you're responsible for it. And so the students can share that among each other. Yeah, and the students really feel transformed about
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the hospital space because we're I teach a fourth year a class for fourth year medical students and they've been there, you know, four years, sometimes longer if they were getting an MD PhD. And they will say that they never even really noticed any of the art at all. And then it started it transforms the way they're thinking about the next place they're going in terms of their match rank lists. Like, hey, do I want to go someplace where I can, you know, have this environment that's restorative and so
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So it alters their own kind of conception about how they want to live their life and and sometimes they identify pieces of art if they're staying on at Hopkins for their residency, they identify pieces of art that they are going to return to in times of duress and need.
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Thoughts, next steps, questions.
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This is a great session. And I just wondered if you could comment from a pedagogic point of view on this confidence that you project in the art and in our imagination. I mean, you had no way of knowing where this would go, and yet it's a great session. And I mean it would just be nice, I think, for those of us want to plunge into it to hear more about where you get this confidence from. Well, you know, I think
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Th there this was insight was shared by somebody else with me because they study personal growth. and they have talked about in the literature the components of personal growth being reflection, a powerful experience paired with reflection as well as group discussion. And what they said after spending two and a half days, we had a national convening in DC around this topic, they said
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I get it now. You're creating predictably powerful experiences.
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you're g that are paired with reflection and group discussion support. And so it models what can be happened in the clinical experience, right? The powerful clinical experience, and and it shows the students, the learners the power of reflecting on that s experience and getting support from either one person or a group of people, a community to to help process
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That experience. So yeah, art is can be emotionally evocative. It takes us to a different place out of our heads. And it yeah, we can design these predictably powerful experiences. So, yes, we have confidence in that. We've also studied, and other people have studied, the impact of these experiences. We found that in our four week course, our students actually were below the mean on a capacity for wonder scale, which was developed at Hopkins, so we know.
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What the mean is at Hopkins, and they left the course above the mean, statistically significantly so. They came in below the mean on tolerance for ambiguity. They left the course above the mean. And we have that those means are set by the AMC because they that the tolerance for ambiguity scales on the matriculation student questionnaire and the graduating student questionnaire. So that data on like 10,000 students has been published. So yeah, we're very convinced from
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kind of our first hand experience as well as the quantitative measures we've conducted as well as the in the literature that have been reported that these are powerful pedagogical tools. And talking about confidence as well, I became confident that
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This will be the most engaging part of our meeting and I became confident that I'll be surprised every single time. There are so many images on the on the on the table that I could have never picked for for hope or for what it means to be a physician. And every student will surprise you with with why they picked a card.
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How often do you find that students
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up a card as a prompt to kind of give an argument about what's wrong with the world or how we need to change and that it and I it isn't doesn't I haven't noticed it happening here and I just wonder is that a challenge or do you find that this practice tends to draw out of people more of a reflection that's less kind of performing a an insistence on something being
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different or a certain way in the world and more ref reflection from their heart. Yeah. I I'm curious if other people what their thoughts are, but I haven't seen that. I haven't seen it be a kind of a soapbox or a platform for an idea. It's been more personal. And I think the prompts is what kind of anchors that discussion around that. So I think the prompts are very helpful.
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Not to say that some of the personal reflections can't be go to some difficulty or challenge, but would would would you say visual thinking strategies has more potential for for that? Because it's kind of open ended, no prompt, no especially. No, because I think you know, with good facilitation skills you can you can moderate that in a way so that you don't give that more of a v amplification. It's very structured.
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Hands in the back. I'm coming.
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we I did one of these with one of the Protestant churches where we went into the museum and and purposefully they put the kind of Gnostic or atheistic aut artists paintings and we examine them from that perspective to see it s it was something really like Frida Kalo, okay.
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that there actually is emotion and faith and it it was an interesting flip kind of from the perspective of to what what Farr was just talking about is bringing some understanding of maybe people think that they're separated from the ethics and the faith and all of that, but they really weren't.
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Yeah, I think that's the beauty of art really because it's portraying the h human condition in a way. and the things that unite all of us, even though you might have sort of ideologic kind of stances, that it sort of cuts through that. I mean, that's one of the you know, I
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One of the motivations for using art in my work is because it's so much easier to get into topics of what's true and what's good through art rather than heading talking about those head on, but those topics come out. and I love that you that's a great use of sort of that's a wonderful exercise I would think to kind of highlight that. We typically don't select I've had a couple
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People ask me about image selection or art object selection for these exercises. We typically don't select art that has a known narrative unless it's for a special group or unless the group's been together for a long time. Like I've led discussions of works of art that are connected to sort of the the gospel readings or whatever for that week with groups you know from the parish, but
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generally with our students, because we're at a secular university, we don't use religious art, although sometimes we do, and it helps but it's only after the group's been together and feel and people in the group feel comfortable talking about their own faith. And so we for instance the last week of our four-week course we have a discussion of visual thinking strategies discussion around Salvador Dali's The Last Supper and
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And it helps some and well I say that's a known narrative, but two of our 12 students last year said, not known to me. And so it was really helpful for them. They really appreciated being able to learn about other faith traditions through the discussions that were held around the the pieces. So I think it's a way of opening people up to these some of these ideas that they might not be familiar with or they might have biases.
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about.
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Thank you. I I wanted to ask about you guys mentioned that you so when you s sometimes you'll start a Hippocratic society meeting with the artwork, and that will be an exercise in sort of helping people to define the virtue themselves, and then you sort of move into definitions from the curriculum and then you know continue on with the discussion from there. I'm wondering how you navigate that
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that transition from our own definitions of the virtue to okay now let's come to a common definition or a definition from the curriculum and whether whether you guys find the need to course correct very often and if so how you do that in a in a nuanced, you know, elegant way.
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College might want to answer that because he does a very deaf job of you know, not only do we paraphrase after everybody's shared, but then he kind of tries to kind of highlight certain themes that have come out and then links it to the once we show the definitions, links how some of those themes connected with the definitions. But I think it's a good point. but we don't
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We don't explicitly talk about the dis kind of differences or the discrepancies, but let people kind of reflect on that themselves in terms of what their ideas were and how they might be different and because I obviously we don't want to embarrass anybody or anything like that. But Kahla, do you have more to say on that? Often the definitions would be kind of spot on. when we when we were discussing prudence, students struggled even with the linguistic definition.
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prudence. So they looked up the definition, shared it with everyone, and then everyone tried to kind of squeeze into that squeeze that definition into their kind of ref reaction to the to the image. But overall, I think most definitions students provide are kind of you know aligned with the overall theme that we're discussing and then we try to offer a collective kind of summary of of everyone's experience and then kind of link it to kind of more formal definitions and and kind of paint a broader picture of the of the virtual prudence was an unfamiliar vocabulary
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Yeah.
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Unless there is one more pressing comment, I think this is a good place for us to any any one last one last one. One last one.
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I have a question about the sh the process of choosing the the the the artwork because we want it to be as neutral and as spread out as possible. And I wonder what is the process that you use to choose the what the artwork. Well, for the personal responses tour, I try to find works that have that have multiple narrative possibilities.
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That somehow might connect, like for this deck that we had about hope, that somehow might connect to some aspect of hope, but it's very broad. So it's more just trying to have sort of a diversity of images, some photos, some paintings. Sometimes we have objects that we have images of that so that there are multiple ways in and multiple ways that people can connect. I mean, these laminated cards are very
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Very kind of generic images in a way, right? But I think there's so there's details or there's overall picture, big picture ideas. So really it's more the open-endedness of it. I do like to have a diversity of figures that are re represented.
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divers it I like to have a diversity of media, I like to have a diversity of of artists represented so that people from their own personal experience might ha find an entry point.
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How many of you are planning to try and use that in your chapter meetings? Raise your hand. All right, success. All right. Thank you all. Thank you all so much.
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Thank you very much for joining and reflecting with us today.
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