To Integrate Humanities Into Regular PBL Curriculum: Current Situation And Future Strategy

Nowadays, a growing attention is paid to Medical Humanities which is a must for being 'Tomorrow's doctors'. However, the humanity education still has not met the need. Conflict between quality and quantity of the relative courses is especially outstanding.PBL, a teaching method with humanistic property, shares the same goal with medical humanities, a people-foremost education. Hence, it is assured of relieving the study burden and promoting teaching efficiency and effect to introduce medical humanities into medical PBL curriculum.This paper presents the idea by reviewing the background, discussing the nature of PBL, humanities and curriculum integration to see the possibility of a new teaching mode—the integration of humanities and scientific medicine into PBL course. And then, some questions are raised for future researches by analyzing the questionnaire survey from some medical schools in China and some advanced programs in teaching medical humanities in other countries.This thesis includes five parts:Part 1:Focusing. This part is about where the research question is raised and the research routine is set.Part 2:Rethinking. In this part, the basic concepts are rescanned, including Medical Humanities, PBL and Curriculum integration. Then the theoretical possibility is covered to set up the integrated PBL course.Part 3:Surveying. Questionnaires about the current situation of Medical humanities as well as PBL of domestic medical schools are sent out, and in this part the results are showed and discussed.Part 4:Suggestion. In this part, several pieces of suggestion to the integration of humanities and PBL are made by considering both the real situation of medical education in China and the experience of medical humanity education from developed countries.Part 5:Epilogue. The potential steps for further researches are described.