Anna Harris (A.)

SenseSquared

Six European partners work together on the central question: How can a sensory approach and an artistic attitude contribute to an education that leads to a more connected and sustainable world? Through artistic interventions, workshops, tools and publications, SenseSquared wants to demonstrate that this approach can and should become the heart of all education.

Sense-Based Learning

This project aims to re-balance and reassert the importance of sensory skills in tertiary education and in professional practice. It does so through interventions in the existing curriculum across Faculties. The interventions can take the shape of specifically designed learning units (courses, electives or part of courses), learning resources (physical or digital presented in the Sensory Learning Lab), activities, specifically designed internships, etc.

Making Clinical Sense

Digital technologies are reconfiguring medical practices in ways we still don’t understand. This ERC Starting Grant project (2016 – 2022) will examine the impact of the digital in medicine by studying the role of pedagogical technologies in how doctors learn the skills of their profession. It focuses on the centuries-old skill of physical examination; a sensing of the body, through the body. Increasingly medical students are learning these skills away from the bedside, through videos, simulated models and in laboratories. With a research team of two PhDs and a postdoc, we will interrogate how learning with these technologies impacts on how doctors learn to sense bodies. Through the rich case of doctors-in-training the study will address a key challenge in social scientific scholarship regarding how technologies, particularly those digital and virtual, are implicated in bodily, sensory knowing of the world. The research takes a historically-attuned comparative anthropology approach, advancing the social study of medicine and medical education research in three new directions.

• First, three ethnographers will attend to both spectacular and mundane technologies in medical education, recognising that everyday learning situations are filled with technologies old and new.
• Second, the project offers the first comparative social study of medical education with fieldwork in three materially and culturally different settings in Western and Eastern Europe, and West Africa.
• Finally, the study brings historical and ethnographic research of technologies closer together, with a historian postdoc conducting oral histories and archival research at each site.

The findings of this research project promise to have impact in the social sciences and education research by advancing understanding of how the digital and other technologies are implicated in skills learning. The study will also develop novel theory and digital-sensory methodologies. By working closely with colleagues in medical education, including in Maastricht, these academic contributions also promise to have practical relevance by contributing towards the training of doctors in digital times.