Medical Humanities and Active Learning

Medical humanities is a multidisciplinary field within medical education, which explores contexts and experiences, as well as critical and conceptual issues in medicine and health care, by employing varied arrays of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences. Active learning, on the other hand, refers to a learning method that aims to assist students in understanding the subject at focus through promoting their own inquiry, gathering and analyzing data in order to solve higher-order cognitive problems. The current chapter aims at explaining theoretically and demonstrating from a “hands-on experience” how and why active learning and the domain of medical humanities are interconnected. Sharing and using the experience gained in the medical humanities program deployed at the Faculty of Medicine at BIU, it is demonstrated how key principles of active learning can come into play in the medical humanities and support the goals such program pursues. In addition, some practical tips about the actual implementation of active learning in the realm of medical humanities are shared in the form of “education pearls” comprised of dos and don’ts.