The Constructive Approach to Teaching Anatomy through Clay Modeling: A Multi‐Tier Educational Value

Abstract

The art of teaching anatomy has been traditionally performed via dissection. Most anatomy courses, ranging from fetal pig dissection in high school (HS) to human donor dissection in medical school, require a destructive process for discovering anatomical structures in 3D space. In contrast, clay modeling (CM) is a constructive approach to understanding spatial anatomical relationships. This qualitative study reports the experiences of two former medical students, a Syracuse HS teacher, anatomy faculty from two medical schools, and a third grader who participated in daylong workshops using the Anatomy in Clay Learning System. This haptic approach, used to model female perineal muscles from clay, emphasized touch and proprioception with continuous iterative feedback to ensure learning throughout the activity. While the instructors and students (now resident physicians) gained a greater appreciation of the region, a new world of anatomy was exposed to an unsuspecting, but curious, elementary school student. Participants with anatomy experience reported much improved familiarity with the pelvis, and in particular the attachments of the obturator internus muscle, even after having dissected the region previously. While the pedagogical question whether to implement CM before or after lab dissections arose, the experience revealed CM to be a highly valuable tool across multiple educational tiers.