The Poetry of Lived Experience:
A Disability Poetics Workshop That Collaborates with Medical Practice
My name is Shane Neilson. I am a mad/autistic poet and physician from New Brunswick with an interest in disability poetics. I have encountered ableism repeatedly in my travels as both physician and patient. Something I’ve thought about a lot is how might we change the attitudes of health care practitioners around the ill? One way is didactic – to provide evidence around degrees of satisfaction and different outcomes amongst disabled folk. Another way is to have trainees meet disabled people and learn from their experience. Using the arts is another means to allow health care workers to imagine into disabled experience.
The purpose of this workshop, then, is to encourage medical practitioners to use arts-based methods so that the limits of understanding the lived experience of patients can be understood.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize the special plight of disabled people in a clinical setting.
- Use poetry to challenge and change attitudes towards disabled people.
- Strengthen critical self-reflection skills.
Lessons
RECOMMENDED FORMAT: Self-directed, Small Group, Journal Club, Classroom Course
Go to Facilitation Guides
CURRICULUM DETAILS:
Total Length: 1 hour
3 short videos
Self-reflection/group discussion questions
2 poetry exercises
INSTRUCTIONS:
- Download the Workshop document from the Workshop tab.
- Follow the step-by-step instructions in the Workshop document.
We invite you to participate in this evaluation survey about your most recent experience with our website. You can complete this evaluation after each learning resource you finish, or after you have worked through multiple resources.
Additional Resources
Click above link to view Additional Resources.
If you have further interest in Canadian poetry by disabled people who engage with medical themes, then see:
Nisha Patel’s Coconut, (NeWest Press, 2021)
Nisa Malli's Allodynia (Palimpsest Press, 2022)
Tea Gerbeza's How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2024)
Roxanna Bennett's Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019)
Contributors
Shane Neilson
