The goal of the present Research Topic is to provide a forum where research groups, investigating teaching and teachers from multiple perspectives involving multidisciplinary (i.e., different disciplines working on different aspects of a problem independently within their disciplinary boundaries), interdisciplinary (i.e., restructuring and integrating existing disciplinary approaches to address problems relevant for all participating disciplines) and ideally transdisciplinary (i.e., seeking to integrate different lines of work from contributing disciplines to create new approaches or even new scientific disciplines) approaches (Hall, 2018; (...) Klein, 2017), can present and discuss the opportunities and challenges of such endeavors. The articles published in the research topic can be broadly classified into three categories: Conceptual reviews of transdisciplinary research on teaching and teachers, the results of transdisciplinary research projects, and methodological challenges and innovations related to transdisciplinary cooperation. Conceptual reviews of transdisciplinary researchThe Research Topic is initiated by Pea and Linn, who provide their personal perspectives on the emergence of the learning sciences as a transdisciplinary research community from the early 1970s to today. In line with the Research Topic’s aim, the paper illustrates how the specific approach of the learning sciences integrated approaches from disciplines as diverse as science education, psychology, an... (shrink)

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their (...) diseases into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, (...) pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

Reacting to contemporary thinkers who celebrate a liberation from absolute truth, Arthur Holmes explores historical ways of grounding moral values objectively in the nature of reality and reconnecting to objective and universal moral norms.

The narrative ethicist imagines life as multiple points of view, each reflecting a distinct imagination and each more or less capable of comprehending other points of view and how they imagine. Each point of view is constantly being acted out and then modified in response to how others respond. People generally have good intentions, but they get stuck realizing those intentions. Stories stall when dialogue breaks down. People stop hearing others' stories, maybe because those others have quit telling their stories. (...) The narrative ethicist's job is to help people generate new imaginations that can restart dialogues. (shrink)

Increasingly, medicine is used to remodel, revise, and revamp as much as to heal and mend. It is tempting to say that people make merely personal choices about these new uses. But such choices have implications for everybody, and they ought to be made cautiously, slowly, and in a way that opens them to discussion.

Narrative ethics holds that if you ask someone what goodness is, as a basis of action, most people will first appeal to various abstractions, each of which can be defined only by other abstractions that in turn require further definition. If you persist in asking what each of these abstractions actually means, eventually that person will have to tell you a story and expect you to recognize goodness in the story. Goodness and badness need stories to make them thinkable and (...) to translate them into individual and collective actions. Yet after more than two decades of considering the issue, I do not believe that a collection of stories can by itself guide actions in ways that are sufficient to respond to ethical troubles in institutional settings. The question will always remain open for me, but my present belief is that narrative bioethics is always hyphenated, in the sense that guidance from stories needs to be allied with other ethical guidance. Each side of the hyphen qualifies the other side. The hyphenation I will argue for in this essay is “narrative-deontology.”. (shrink)

During Abraham Nussbaum's first year of medical school, he participated in a white coat ceremony and was invested, literally, with a white coat that is symbolic of entry into the medical profession. He was also given a book, an anthology of writings on medicine that Nussbaum describes as having a "wistful quality" and being "engaging but reverential" ; the dust jacket featured a Norman Rockwell painting. He later went to a second-hand bookstore and traded the anthology for Abraham Verghese's 1994 (...) memoir, My Own Country, an excerpt from which was in the anthology. For Nussbaum, struggling to figure out what it means to be a doctor, Verghese's writing "portrays the physician as the storyteller of his... (shrink)

This symposium contribution presents three vignettes of resistance to COVID-19 public health measures in Alberta, Canada, where I live. These show resolutely individualistic attitudes toward health and a desire to understand the pandemic as a one-off aberration. I then suggest four ways that the work of bioethics needs to change. These begin with situating the pandemic within the context of global climate emergency and end with how a new polarization diminishes possibilities for the rational dialogue that bioethics has here-to-fore assumed (...) people would engage in. (shrink)

The article considers some problems with the pairing of joking and disability, and then questions whether the world of the ill is pseudotheological, as Stronach and Allan quote Kundera saying it is. Aspects of Kundera's argument that Stronach and Allan omit suggest a more complex relation between disability, the body and the presence of the person in the multiple texts that end up being involved: Stronach and Allan's text, autobiographical texts such as Robert Murphy's, and the text of several jokes, (...) including one of my own which frames the article. (shrink)

The ethics of telling stories about other people become questionable as soon as humans learn to talk. But the stakes get higher when health care professionals tell stories about those whom they serve. But for all the problems that come with such stories, I do not believe it is either practical or desirable for bioethicists to attempt to legislate an end to this storytelling. What we need instead is narrative nuance. We need to understand how to tell respectful stories in (...) which the patients are fully acknowledged fellow participants, not one‐dimensional objects of a knowing gaze. The problem is not narration itself but a particular version of narrational privilege, and getting rid of that would have benefits far beyond practices of writing case studies. In this essay, I first offer four considerations that I have found either omitted or underemphasized in discussions of the ethics of telling stories about patients. I then sketch a model of medical storytelling that might be the basis for shifting the ethical question from whether to how. (shrink)

A collection of stories by bioethicists writing about their own illnesses displays the importance of microethics. From this perspective, ethics happens not in the application of principles to specific decisions, but rather in the moment-to-moment flow of clinical interaction, as healthcare workers and patients make decisions, especially in their use of language. Microethical issues that are common to multiple stories are described as dense junctures of ethical concern. Three junctures are discussed in detail: conflicts between medical and patient rationalities, issues (...) of how clinicians represent patients, and practices of truth telling. These junctures are illustrated with examples from the bioethicists’ personal stories of treatment. (shrink)

Who's afflicted? Early in Nicole Piemonte's book Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice, she quotes an email from a physician whose voice sets the problem and tone. He describes himself as someone “who has intended well” but then “nearly burned out because of the insidious process of physician formation that left me a mess at the threshold of the suffering of other human beings.” His confessional manifesto regrets “the sad things I have seen and done.” His narrative (...) then turns to redemption: “I was—pardon the sentiment—loved back into a good medical practice as a form of growing wisdom and care” (pp. x–xi). Afflicted is written for those who hear this voice speaking for many others. (shrink)

When clinician‐patient relationships go wrong, the problem may not be merely that one person is knowingly mistreating the other. More likely, they are caught up in different stories, and animated by different moral visions. The task is for each to see the point of the other's story.