How to get a children's perspective through children's fiction for students at Medical School.

How to get a children´s perspective through children’s fiction for students at Medical School.

For some years ago we wanted to give the students at Umea University, who in their coming profession will meet children in difficult situations, a more deep perspective on how it is to be a little child in bad circumstances through fiction literature. We wanted to do this for those who studied at the Police school, the Social work education and the Medical School. But we minimized our efforts to get money to manage this project only at the Medical School.

We chose the time of our lessons when the students in Medical School had their Pediatric and Obstetrics courses and as a complement to the course books in those courses we wanted to work with childrens fiction. The plans and ideas was planned by one medical librarian from the Medical Library, one childrens books librarian from the county library and a drama teacher from the department of Pedagogy at the university.

As the course time was already fulltime for the students, we had to schedule our lessons to those days when all students where back from their clinical work in different hospitals and clinics and in the beginning of the semester. So we planned and had three meetings with three different subjects in the fiction literature. The subjects were anorexia, child abuse and sick children + children as family to sick parents, brothers or sisters. First we tested different literature methods and drama methods in a group of medical librarians, information retrieval teachers.

The students participation was optional. So those that wanted to join could do that. At first we got 15 interested students that checked out books to read the literature. But everyone couldn’t come to the meetings, so we had a group of 8 students that came every time. At each meeting the students could discuss the books that we all had read and the drama teacher had different drama sessions as Forum plays, State your point of view at a line, Questions in four corners.

The important thing was to get a deeper childrens perspective for the students. So that they would feel safer in their physician’s role with the children, adolescents and parents at the appointments and that they sometimes can see beyond what the patients say.

In December we will have all evaluation data ready from the students. So we can present the results from the whole project.