Scripts Teaching Fellowships
Narrative and Lyric Health Fellowships
Beginning Fall 2022 two doctoral students will serve as teaching fellows at the College of Medicine in a pilot program sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Medicine. Each position is a two-year appointment (beginning in the student’s third year of study) in which fellowship duties are reassigned from the English Department to the College of Medicine. As with a standard assistantship, the fellows will devote 20 hours per week to their positions and will be paid the equivalent of a teaching assistantship salary ($20,104.89 for nine months). They will expand their study of narrative and lyric health, assist professors of medicine, and teach writing workshops in the below capacities:
- Assist in an introductory Narrative and Lyric Health experience as part of the Physicians, Patients, and Populations course
- Craft and assess writing assignments required by professors of medicine
- Assist COM faculty in compiling a portfolio of students’ writing for evaluation
- Lead regular Narrative and Lyric Health workshops (a number of which will be required over the course of COM students’ degree program)
- Lead drop-in creative writing workshops for faculty, students, and community members
- Curate, edit, and publish a print and/or online anthology of writing by medical students and by those community members served by the Household-Centered Program
- Explore humanism in health care more broadly by participating in a monthly learning group of COM faculty.
Goals benefitting the growth and professionalization of Narrative and Lyric Health Fellows include the following:
- Exploring new pedagogies in a professional school setting
- Gaining experience working in specialized, nonacademic communities
- Enhancing cultural awareness by observing the relationship between medical students and underserved community members and by reading and discussing the writing of both groups
- Increasing skills in curating, editing, and publishing
- Incorporating general reader responses into the study of literary analyses
- Contributing to the revitalization of patient care and the well-being of medical professionals
- Bringing experiences of cultural diversity, professional breadth, and pedagogical innovation to their peers in Creative Writing Pedagogy and to the education of UH first-year and English undergraduate students whom they will teach.
The pilot’s ultimate aim is establishment of a Narrative and Lyric Health course (team-taught or faculty-led). This course would accomplish the following Narrative and Lyric Health objectives:
- Encourage empathy through the reading of healing and illness narratives
- Establish habits of reflection and processing as a permanent practice
- Attain language flexibility, especially cultural responsiveness, through the creation of meaningful metaphors and the practice of inhabiting alternative points of view
- Improve diagnostic skills through narrative study
- Improve research communication by developing excellent writing skills
- Enhance cultural awareness and sensitivity through the reading of diverse literatures.