The Spiritual Exercises and Professional Identity Formation in Medical Education
Mark Clark, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Humanities, University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine
Medical education has concerned itself, recently, with promoting a Professional Identity Formation of medical students—promoting a process, this is to say, of cultivating the virtues and elements of character that yields an embodied “professionalism.” The transformative journey of identity formation promoted by medical educators—who hope that their students can freely choose to devote themselves to a vocation of compassionate, capable healing—may be profoundly enriched and informed by the 475-year wisdom of Jesuit formation processes and the Spiritual Exercises. This paper explains how this is so and how the integration is being accomplished in the new curriculum of a medical school whose inaugural class began studies in the summer of 2017.
The present author, a member of the founding faculty, was a principal designer of the curriculum. Previously, he had been appointed to a University of Texas Task Force charged with defining Professional Identity Formation, proposing constitutive dimensions of this formation, and proposing curricular strategies to effect the transformative process. The task force generated a 90-page document that determined domains and subdomains of the formative experience and made recommendations of general pedagogical strategies to promote the associated longitudinal development over the course of medical education. The task force received considerable praise for its work and published its recommendations in a 2015 issue of Academic Medicine.
In the curricular design of the new medical school, the author drew on his experience with the task force and on his considerable experience with Jesuit formation to help create a longitudinal process of Professional Identity Formation that is congruent with the Mission of the school’s sponsoring Roman Catholic university—a mission that is grounded in an incarnational spirituality and that is committed to educating students to be contemplatives in action. The institutional environment is one, then, that is amenable to curricular integrations of Ignatian spirituality, insights and practices of Jesuit formation, and adaptations of the Spiritual Exercises for implementation in medical school coursework. This paper discusses such implementation as a longitudinal process taking place over the first two, pre-clinical years of medical school. Highlights to be noted include cultivating a sense of awe—with respect to the human body and its integration with mind and spirit, and with respect to human (Aristotelian) final causation—in correlation with the First Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises; developing a sense of limitation, suffering, failure, and sin in personal and systemic contexts; developing habits of contemplation and reflection through engagements with stories, Applications of the Senses, and exercises of the moral imagination; developing capacities for Ignatian discernment; participating in apostolic endeavors of community engagement in clinical and public health initiatives as required, integrated dimensions of the curriculum; and ultimately making a free choice to pursue the vocation of medicine. Though these curricular innovations have taken place at a Catholic institution, they may, the author contends, be incorporated effectively in non-Catholic medical schools: such is the reach of this formative wisdom.
Medical education has concerned itself, recently, with promoting a Professional Identity Formation of medical students—promoting a process, this is to say, of cultivating the virtues and elements of character that yields an embodied “professionalism.” The transformative journey of identity formation promoted by medical educators—who hope that their students can freely choose to devote themselves to a vocation of compassionate, capable healing—may be profoundly enriched and informed by the 475-year wisdom of Jesuit formation processes and the Spiritual Exercises. This paper explains how this is so and how the integration is being accomplished in the new curriculum of a medical school whose inaugural class began studies in the summer of 2017.
The present author, a member of the founding faculty, was a principal designer of the curriculum. Previously, he had been appointed to a University of Texas Task Force charged with defining Professional Identity Formation, proposing constitutive dimensions of this formation, and proposing curricular strategies to effect the transformative process. The task force generated a 90-page document that determined domains and subdomains of the formative experience and made recommendations of general pedagogical strategies to promote the associated longitudinal development over the course of medical education. The task force received considerable praise for its work and published its recommendations in a 2015 issue of Academic Medicine.
In the curricular design of the new medical school, the author drew on his experience with the task force and on his considerable experience with Jesuit formation to help create a longitudinal process of Professional Identity Formation that is congruent with the Mission of the school’s sponsoring Roman Catholic university—a mission that is grounded in an incarnational spirituality and that is committed to educating students to be contemplatives in action. The institutional environment is one, then, that is amenable to curricular integrations of Ignatian spirituality, insights and practices of Jesuit formation, and adaptations of the Spiritual Exercises for implementation in medical school coursework. This paper discusses such implementation as a longitudinal process taking place over the first two, pre-clinical years of medical school. Highlights to be noted include cultivating a sense of awe—with respect to the human body and its integration with mind and spirit, and with respect to human (Aristotelian) final causation—in correlation with the First Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises; developing a sense of limitation, suffering, failure, and sin in personal and systemic contexts; developing habits of contemplation and reflection through engagements with stories, Applications of the Senses, and exercises of the moral imagination; developing capacities for Ignatian discernment; participating in apostolic endeavors of community engagement in clinical and public health initiatives as required, integrated dimensions of the curriculum; and ultimately making a free choice to pursue the vocation of medicine. Though these curricular innovations have taken place at a Catholic institution, they may, the author contends, be incorporated effectively in non-Catholic medical schools: such is the reach of this formative wisdom.