Salud, to your health! Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish

FAIN: AA-284617-22

University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)
Kristine Muñoz (Project Director: May 2021 to present)
Daena J. Goldsmith (Co Project Director: December 2021 to present)

A three-year project to develop a digital resource for teaching health narratives in English and Spanish.

This project will construct a digital resource bank for teaching and learning health narratives at the postsecondary level, emphasizing the benefits to many kinds of learners of both reading and writing stories about health, illness, and caregiving. By the time they reach college age, many college students have increasingly complex experiences of mental and physical illness, their own or that of their loved ones. Courses that lead students through reading and writing about health issues teach them to contextualize those experiences within broader perspectives on language, meaning, relationship, and ethics. The digital resource bank will facilitate courses in many English disciplines and for Spanish majors and minors, encouraging both health humanities programming and community outreach. PIs will lead in person workshops and webinars to maximize use of the website, and an online journal will be created to publish peer-reviewed undergraduate health narratives in Spanish.

Associated Products

Beyond medical Spanish: Incorporating health humanities into the Spanish curriculum. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Beyond medical Spanish: Incorporating health humanities into the Spanish curriculum.
Author: Kristine Munoz
Abstract: This presentation demonstrates, with materials drawn from an open access resource that features a database of health narratives in English and Spanish, how Spanish courses built around health humanities could extend the impact of widely popular medical Spanish coursework further into undergraduate curricula. This expansion, I argue, has potential to attract Spanish majors and minors interested in health professions.
Date: 11/18/2024
Conference Name: Examined Life conference

Workshop: A searchable database of health narratives (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Workshop: A searchable database of health narratives
Author: Goldsmith, D.
Abstract: This 2.5 hour workshop will demonstrate the Health Story Hub, an open access, fully searchable databased of health narratives and teaching materials intended to facilitate communication studies coursework. It will include dedicated time to search and retrieve resources from the database. The training was attended by instructors in a variety of contexts, including traditional universities as well as community colleges and a technically oriented four-year school. Graduate students in Communication Studies were also among the attendees.
Date: 11/18/2024
Conference Name: National Communication Association

Health Story Hub (Web Resource)
Title: Health Story Hub
Author: Munoz, K.
Author: Goldsmith, D.
Abstract: ealth Story Hub is a web-based resource that will encourage storytelling about health, illness, and healing in classrooms, community groups, and health care contexts. Telling stories about profound experiences is the central way human beings make sense of birth, death, and everything in between. Stories also connect us, instruct and correct, enlarge our understanding of what we ourselves know to be true. The Hub is a searchable database of health narratives, scholarly articles related to narrative medicine and other uses of storytelling in healing, and teaching materials (syllabi, class outlines, assessment suggestions). Its purpose is to facilitate incorporating stories and storytelling into a variety of classroom, community and clinical contexts. The Quill and Scroll blog connected to this site highlights events and groups concerned with health narratives. It also provides occasional interviews with people who use storytelling in their teaching, community work or activism. The site’s Publications page will house an online Spanish-language journal of health narratives written by university undergraduates, and Course Books: collections of material from which to create courses centered on health narratives.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://healthstoryhub.lib.uiowa.edu/

Teaching (with) health narratives across the undergraduate curriculum: Expanding on syllabi. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Teaching (with) health narratives across the undergraduate curriculum: Expanding on syllabi.
Author: Daena Goldsmith
Author: Kristine Muñoz
Abstract: This presentation demonstrated an open-access, fully searchable database of health narratives and teaching materials intended to facilitate creation and revision of curricula across various disciplines, including literature, media and communication studies, and health professional preparation.
Date: 4/12/2024

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