Presented by: Elysse Leonard M.A.

Film and television are powerful media for storytelling, making use of a wide range of expressive tools to convey meaning and to evoke emotional responses. This workshop will offer a practical introduction on how to engage more deeply with film in both individual and group settings. Through a series of interactive exercises and guided viewing, learn strategies and descriptive language for performing a close reading of a film – examining aspects of form and narrative – and leading, or participating in, group discussions about film.

Presented by: Barbara Sibbald BJ

Editing your own work can be a difficult task. Barbara Sibbald will guide you through an approaching using the mnemonic DRAFT: Deconstruct, Reader, Aloud, Cut the fat, Toss the last paragraph.

Presented by: Damian Tarnopolsky PhD

This workshop introduces the theory and practice of narrative-based medicine for health practitioners and students. Participants will learn about the development of the field and the significance of stories in healthcare, and have the opportunity to try out writing exercises in fiction, memoir, poetry and drama. Led by an accomplished novelist with long experience teaching in health contexts, this workshop will interest both healthcare professionals seeking to inform their practice with narrative-based approaches and those looking to explore creative and reflective writing for their own sake.

Presented by: Hartley Jafine M.A. (PhD Candidate)

Arts-based research is the use of artistic practices, such as theatre or photography, to collect, analyze, and communicate research (Leavy, 2015). Sessions will offer an introduction to arts-based research methodologies, identify its value in healthcare, and illustrate how it has been used for research communication, development of policy, teaching, and reflective practice.

Presented by: Michael Roberts MD

So many of our clinical encounters do not really cease when we write a prescription or send a patient for a lab test or X-ray. These experiences seem to touch us on a level that can be mysterious, profound or disturbing. In our busy lives as physicians there are few venues, few opportunities, to debrief from these profound personal and professional experiences. Joining in writing and conversation with colleagues in a Balint Group allows one to further emotionally metabolize these experiences, rather than letting them seep too deeply into one's personal life. In this participatory workshop you will learn about the fascinating history of Balint Groups, appreciate what makes for a successful group process and engage in a mock Narrative Medicine Balint Group to discover the power and vital importance of a reflective writing group practice.

Presented by: Glen Bandiera MD

Artists have a lot to teach us about perception and meaning making - A facilitated discussion with an artist, director or performer will help us contemplate medicine as an art.

Presented by: Ann Sirek MD, PhD

This title is about the true-in-general (as in Clinical Practice Guidelines) in tension with the good-in-particular, or about movement vs paralyses, or about life-giving vs. life-depleting. Many more pairs could be identified and crafted into an overarching metanarrative to guide clinical practice.
Healthcare engages the vital movement of a sufferer advancing towards well-being using the symbols and imagery of a spiritual practice. This narrative of transformation serves as the sufferer’s meta- narrative into which the evidence-based interventions are inscribed.

Presented by: Diana Toubassi MD

The benefits of engaging with narrative, and with reflective practice more generally, are well-established, and include enhanced personal wellbeing, as well as improved educational and clinical performance. This session will review a local experience crafting and evaluating a reflective curriculum for residents, and share strategies for optimizing the success of such a curriculum in other programs.

Presented by: Suze Berkhout MD

In this workshop, participants will explore critical qualitative research methods that utilize narrative as well as multi-modal approaches to knowledge production and data analysis. A short primer on qualitative health research theory and philosophy will be followed by a practical approach to the considerations that go into designing narrative research practices, including considerations of the world-view, epistemology, and ethics of these practices. Participants will be encouraged to think through these considerations in light of their own research questions and interests and support will be provided to those looking to develop their own study protocols.

Presented by: Sara Kim MD

In medicine, we are educated in a specialized expertise of the body. How does this inform our relationship to the body and the narratives that we carry? These experiential workshops are an invitation to examine the body through a different lens, cultivating curiosity around our ideas about dance, performance, healthcare and the care that we provide to ourselves

Presented by: Hartley Jafine M.A. (PhD Candidate)

Design thinking uses a creative, human-centered approach to solve “wicked problems” of medicine and healthcare. This offering will introduce design thinking and cultivate a generative and creative mindset required for innovation and problem solving. Through practical approaches of design thinking, participants will engage with the process of human-centered design through empathy, curiosity, prototyping, and testing.

Presented by: Allison Crawford MD, PhD

Digital storytelling is a mode of creating and sharing stories through the use of technology. Stories can be developed from a poem, an emotion, music, an image, an object, or an existing narrative and can help us explore experiences of marginalization, ability, and resilience.

Presented by: LJ Nelles MFA (PhD Candidate)

This experiential seminar uses methods from actor training to develop a greater sense of self-awareness, an understanding of how we read bodies and how we can move to a more embodied presence in our work. You will discover how to understand how your system responds in relationship and how you can enhance interactions with others-a form of mindfulness in action if you will

Presented by: LJ Nelles MFA (PhD Candidate)

This experiential seminar uses methods from actor training to help you to discover how your voice impacts communication and how you can understand how physical habits impact your natural voice. We will investigate ways to more deeply connect to the words we use through poetry and text to learn the power of being in relationship (to self, other and the words we speak) when we communicate.

Presented by: Michael Roberts MD

There is a growing body of research that suggests that exposing medical trainees to the humanities (including: literature, film, poetry, and visual arts) fosters enhanced critical reflection and empathy in physician-patient encounters. Furthermore, such exposure celebrates the subjective and emotional facets of learning alongside more conventional scientific/evidence based approaches.

This workshop will cover the different approaches to teaching critical reflection and close reading of texts and images. It will explore the future directions for the integration of humanities competency into medical education, allowing participants to gain the experience and the ability to teach these skills.

Presented by: Michael Roberts MD

In this interactive, experiential workshop participants will be provided with opportunities to re/discover how the humanities can be an ongoing resource for wellness and resilience in their personal and professional health and wellbeing, in their care of patients and in teaching medical learners. The session will involve participants working through an examination of prose, poetry, photography, film and painting, and participating in a hands-on writing exercise as a means of determining how they can incorporate these modalities into their practice. This workshop will provide participants with a practical set of tools that they will be able to implement into their practice with patients, use as a teaching tool with learners and integrate into their self-care efforts.

Presented by: Karen Gold MSW

Understanding the lived experiences of illness and disability equips clinicians to engage more empathically in clinical encounters. Participants will explore the meaning and application of illness narratives through discussion, close reading, and reflective writing exercises.

Presented by: Jeremy Rezmovitz MD

Improvisational Theatre can assist in the development of 6/7 CanMeds Roles.
Through this interactive workshop, participants will gain another perspective for how the arts interacts with medicine. Caution: You will have fun.

Presented by: Shane Neilson MD,PhD

Are you interested in poetry as a beginner, or do you have some experience and wish to develop as a poet? Are you unsatisfied by narrative medicine workshops that emphasize the value of production over the cultivation of craft? Join Shane as he conducts 1001 craft-based techniques and guided readings of poems so that you will have a better understanding of how poems work and why they work the way they do. You'll write something beautiful as a result, you won't be able to help it.

Presented by: Bill Gayner MSW

In this workshop, we will explore mindfulness as an embodied social practice, discovering the heart of healing and creative situated responding through meditation, journaling and shared experiential exploration in a way that deepens self-understanding, presence, self-care and ability to communicate with patients and colleagues.

Those totally new to meditation will learn a gentle, welcoming form of meditation that can deepen and transform experience. More experienced meditators will discover ways to expand and refresh their practice. Participants learn to cultivate empathy and compassion towards themselves and others in order to arrive at, make sense of, and transform the places we can all too easily get stuck in meditation and life.

Presented by: Christopher Blake MD

Patients receiving Palliative Care often discover that a lifetime's worth of personal narratives have been dramatically upended by their illness. By attending to these narratives, practitioners providing Palliative Care have the opportunity to profoundly impact a patient's quality of life, even before we write a prescription. In this narratively rich but emotionally charged field, the development of narrative competence is instrumental to caring for our patients and ourselves.

Presented by: Karen Gold MSW

Clinicians are often witness to stories of illness, loss or suffering. Informed by the work of Sayantani DasGupta, participants will explore narrative humility as an approach to listening that emphasizes reciprocity, respect for difference, and clinician self-awareness.

Presented by: Karen Gold MSW

Following an introduction to the concept of professional grief, participants will engage in close reading and reflective writing to consider the role of narrative in acknowledging the tangible (and intangible) losses of everyday practice and a resource for cultivating resiliency.

Presented by: Eva-Marie Stern M.A.

What happens when we face someone and try to see them? A cursory approach gives us data. But if we allow perception to bloom into witnessing, care can happen – care for the Other and care for oneself. This course is a tiny introduction to using our eyes and selves to see more in people, in the context of care.

Presented by: Suze Berkhout MD

This lecture will offer participants an approach to thinking through challenging issues that sit at the intersection of healthcare ethics and epistemology. Content will be adapted to the particular clinical areas of interested participants through a selection of thorny issues and questions that participants contribute ahead of the lecture and will emphasize feminist and disability lenses within philosophy of science/philosophy of medicine.