When teaching, I had a favourite image with which I began my classes on human anatomy and physiology. This I shared in my post ‘OHT1’. I also had a question I asked the students to keep asking themselves throughout the course. It was:
What does this structure or process confer on me?
This, I think of as ‘Motto #1’.
Rather than simply learning about the structures of the human body and what they do, I wanted my students to see what they were learning as being about their bodies. Each of the things we considered had a direct bearing on their lives.
When studying the human body it is easy to adopt an academically detached position disconnecting oneself from the object in question. Here that object is what each of us in the classroom was - a living human being. So, when I spoke of hearts and lungs everybody in the room had these organs actively keeping them alive. (Not least the girl who had had a heart-lung transplant.)
