International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Xu, J., Lajeunesse, M. & Park, M. (2023). Cultivating an embodied interpretative consciousness: Health humanities initiatives at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 24(si1.8). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea24si1.8

Partnerships between museums and medical faculties have increased, with the majority focused on building aptitudes related to clinical reasoning or therapeutic use of self. We report on the results of a partnership between the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University. The Physician Apprenticeship elective focused on aptitudes, such as deep seeing while the Narrative Rehabilitation initiative focused on bodily sensing and hermeneutic competencies, including reflexivity on how past experiences enter interpretive processes. Tracing the impact in a participant learner’s detailed description of a clinical encounter suggests how these two programs result in, what we are calling, embodied interpretive consciousness. The chapter includes descriptions of, and suggests how, the museum educator’s techniques running both programs may be essential for cultivating intersubjective and embodied professional reasoning competencies needed to understand what might matter most to those with whom health professionals work.