A team-teaching collaboration between a Dartmouth College anthropologist and a Geisel School of Medicine infectious-disease expert turned out to be an educational experience for both the students and the faculty.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2013, Sienna Craig<\/a>, an associate professor of anthropology at the college, and Tim Lahey<\/a>, an associate professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine, worked together to teach an undergraduate class called HIV Through a Bio Social Lens: 30 Years of a Modern Plague. Geisel faculty have taught undergraduate classes individually, but the collaboration between Craig and Lahey was unusual, and the result of an informal process.<\/p>\n As a medical anthropologist, Craig\u2019s work focuses on the ways in which cultures and societies understand what \u201chealth\u201d means and how they address illness, including the use of traditional forms of healing and conventional Western medicine. Through work treating and studying HIV in New Hampshire\u2019s Upper Valley and places such as Tanzania, Lahey has bumped up against communication and cultural boundaries.<\/p>\n Given their interests, the two seemed bound to cross paths. And, indeed, one night while talking at the house of a mutual friend, they came up with the idea of teaching a class on HIV together. \u201cWe thought it would be interesting and important for undergraduates who participate in research, clinical work, and education abroad to be sensitized to cultural differences,\u201d Lahey says.<\/p>\n Because Dartmouth students participate in a variety of global health experiences, Craig and Lahey decided that examining the social, cultural, and medical influences of HIV from the divergent perspectives of anthropology and medicine would enrich the undergraduates\u2019 experience.<\/p>\n \u201cTim is an extremely gifted teacher, but in his roles at Geisel and DHMC he doesn\u2019t get to teach undergraduates, and that was appealing to him,\u201d Craig says. \u201cI could immediately imagine how interested Dartmouth College students would be in a team-taught approach to a global health issue.\u201d<\/p>\n For each week of the course, they addressed a different topic. \u201cI might cover how HIV transmission actually occurs\u2014the biology of it,\u201d Lahey explains. \u201cLater in the week, Sienna might talk about how identity is influenced by HIV transmission. Then I\u2019d cover the ways in which we treat HIV with drugs, and Sienna might cover medicalization and how a young person\u2019s self-image might be affected by having to take all of these drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n Team-teaching altered the familiar teacher-centered classroom. The interaction between Craig and Lahey created an environment that challenged students to reevaluate their assumptions about medicine and culture. It challenged Craig and Lahey, too.<\/p>\n \u201cThinking about the course material and diving in to the life cycle of the virus was, for me, not only a wonderful moment to push my knowledge base and to learn something new,\u201d Craig says. \u201cIt was also a chance for me to be able to think about how scientific knowledge is produced and framed in different ways than how I think about it with my students in other anthropology courses.\u201d<\/p>\n Working together, Craig says, she and Lahey developed a rapport with each other that enabled them to \u201cmaintain our senses of humor and senses of humility about what each of our perspectives and expertise could and could not answer within the complex set of issues that is HIV.\u201d<\/p>\n The collaboration even led to some unexpected\u2014and productive\u2014disagreements. In one class, for example, Craig criticized physician behavior and talked about what she saw as shortcomings of the medical model of disease.<\/p>\n \u201cI jumped into the conversation and gave an intentionally somewhat overblown defense of physicians,\u201d Lahey says. \u201cHonestly, I was<\/em> feeling a bit defensive\u2014although I didn\u2019t think she was wrong. It was a nice moment for the students to see two professors arguing and I thought it helped set those viewpoints in nice opposition to each other. But you could tell that it was not what they were used to.\u201d<\/p>\n For both Craig and Lahey, this type of classroom interaction is at the core of a liberal arts education. They both believe that deeply engaged discussion between faculty members with different points of view is a great way to open up boundaries between disciplines.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very respectful, and I think it was really good for the undergraduates who are prehealth to see a physician like Tim who is a humanist as much as he is an infectious-disease doctor,\u201d Craig says. \u201cAnd for me, having students see an anthropologist taking a position not only of critique and social analysis, but of thinking practically about how anthropological theory and method could be used to improve health outcomes was unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n Craig says that the students weren\u2019t the only ones to benefit from the class. \u201cTim is awesome and it was great to work with him. I really loved it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was one of my most, if not the<\/em> most, rewarding teaching experiences that I\u2019ve had over the past eight years as part of the Dartmouth community.\u201d<\/p>\n Lahey says that he learned a lot from the experience as well. \u201cSienna is a rock star, and I felt lucky to have shared a classroom with her,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Although both Craig and Lahey say that it is not easy to put such classes together, they will be teaching the class again in the spring of 2015. Craig says she would like to see barriers to interdisciplinary teaching dismantled to facilitate these kinds of collaborations.<\/p>\n Lahey agrees. \u201cOur goal was to benefit the students from cross-disciplinary teaching, and I think we did,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat was unexpected and great was how much my practice and my teaching were influenced by working with Sienna. 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