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 Munoz (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

Health Story Hub: Teaching, telling and writing health narratives. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Health Story Hub: Teaching, telling and writing health narratives.
Author: Daena Goldsmith
Author: Kristine Munoz
Abstract: This session will introduce conference participants to our NEH-funded website “Salud! To your health: Teaching health narratives in English and Spanish,” currently under development. The site’s mission is to be a repository for teaching materials for courses and workshops in the area of health narratives, in English and Spanish. The site will provide a searchable database for a wide variety of users (e.g., college teachers, health practitioners, community-based support group leaders) who want to incorporate health narratives into their practices. Potential uses will include reading or writing health narratives for language teaching and learning, analyzing narratives as literature, organizing narrative medicine support groups and community storytelling groups around events that have had impacts on physical or mental health, revision of creative writing courses to include health-related topics, and so forth. We will use the discussion session format to introduce the concept of the site and solicit input from participants about the kinds of materials, search functions, and website structure that will serve users who either teach health narratives in various settings, or would like to incorporate health narratives into their work.
Date: 10/20/2022
Conference Name: Examined Life conference

The Power of Health Narratives to Illuminate Social Structures and Lived Experiences. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Power of Health Narratives to Illuminate Social Structures and Lived Experiences.
Author: Lahti, E.
Author: Goldsmith, D.
Author: Munoz, K.
Author: Weaver, J.
Author: Park, B.
Author: Walter Uchison, E.
Author: Pierce, P.
Abstract: It is a central tenet of the health humanities that stories about health matter. The contemporary fascination with memoir and the explosion of online platforms for storytelling make health narratives widely available; yet not all voices are equally heard based on social identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender identity, ability). It can be difficult to find stories from structurally excluded groups or of counter-narratives, which may complicate restoration and resilience themes or implicate health disparities and systemic discrimination. This panel responds directly to the conference call to explore the stories people tell about the relationships between social structures and lived experiences of health, illness, healing, and disability. The projects on this panel invite and make available health narratives, including stories that are structurally silenced, ignored, or misunderstood. By collecting and archiving stories, creating digital libraries, and sharing teaching resources, these panelists make narratives accessible to teachers, community leaders, clinicians, and healthcare professionals. There is power in amplifying the voices of those who go unheard; to model co-conspiratorship by expressing: “Your story matters. We want to make space for it so others can hear it.” Incorporating these narratives into education, professional training, and clinical practice can humanize health care practice. Collections of stories can reveal broader systemic patterns and points of intervention. Our panelists will: describe how they invite, find and make available stories that might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten, and the practical and ethical challenges they encounter; demonstrate what is available in their collection; and engage the audience in discussing how these projects can illuminate connections between social structures, individuals, and communities in regards to health, wellbeing, disability, and illness.
Date: 03/17/2023
Conference Name: Health Humanities Consortium Conference

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/

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