Abstract
Western culture discourages discussion of death and dying, especially with healthy emerging adults. Yet, research shows that engaging this population in conversations about death and dying is empowering and important for young people’s decision-making around and understanding of the end of life. We show that students are indeed ill-informed on such issues but that they desire to learn more. We describe and assess a pilot undergraduate course in palliative care addressing this need, and we demonstrate its success in engaging and educating students using pedagogical approaches built to develop a social and intellectual community of trust.
Highlights
Western culture perpetuates the myth that conversations about palliative care and death should only occur at the end of life
We describe and assess the efficacy of one model to approach this conversation: a palliative care curriculum piloted for undergraduates that is part of a broader project to develop strategies for such teaching that could be used by a variety of academic institutions
Though our findings indicate that this was not the case, the focus of the material proved to be a limitation of the pilot course in addressing palliative care generally
Summary
Western culture perpetuates the myth that conversations about palliative care and death should only occur at the end of life. For the second half of the course students in preassigned groups of two or three each led one session of class learning, selecting their own topics, drawing for inspiration on the personal statements, check-ins, and readings from the first half This approach both allowed students the experience of peer-teaching and the class to continue exploring issues related to death and dying that students wanted to explore further. The teaching team successfully facilitated open and constructive dialogue with students, highlighting the importance of trust as explained in our Community of Inquiry’s focus on social presence Another student reflected that, while the course did not impact their own awareness of mortality, it encouraged them to expand the personal into the context of the community of their peers within the course and beyond, to be “more observant of the way others deal with death outwardly, whether this is through social media, the services they hold, anything they do after [a] death in relation to that person’s life.”. Palliative care education may be necessary in communities beyond undergraduate institutions and may even be most relevant and important in communities that cannot access formal education
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