Integrating Health Humanities and Languages for Specific Purposes in the Classroom: Theoretical Frameworks and Successful Practices

he objective of this article is to share how to incorporate narrative medicine and cultural agency in an advanced world language class, mainly aimed at an audience of students in science related fields (biology, pre-medical, nursing, medical imaging, etc.), so that students can get a better understanding of the nature and depth of communicative exchanges in the healthcare field. The projects on narrative medicine and cultural agency were originally designed for the core course of the “Spanish for Healthcare and Human Services Professionals Certificate” at my institution and became part of the textbook Spanish for Health Care and Human Services: An Interdisciplinary Approach for Intermediate and Advanced Speakers (2022), co-written with Alicia Muñoz Sánchez and adopted in several institutions all over the United States. The certificate program uses a hybrid model of teaching practices that incorporates humanities classes, languages for specific purposes courses, as well as culture and language across the curriculum courses, medical interpreting and study abroad and internships. The hybrid nature of the curriculum endeavors to provide students with an understanding of the healing process that encompasses psycholinguistic studies of the importance of the use of the first language in healthcare in communicative exchanges, along with reflections on how historical and anthropological backgrounds help define somebody’s identity. The certificate also incorporates activities and projects that emphasize the role of cultural agency in redefining the narrative of one’s experience of illness. Because of its hybrid nature, the certificate program was featured in the National Humanities Alliance report “Attracting Students to the Liberal Arts through Integrative Curricula” (2024). This article, specifically, focuses on a combined theoretical framework of health humanities, psycholinguistics and languages for specific purposes, students’ responses to these frameworks, as well as the description of two different students’ projects that require an understanding of the basic premises of both narrative medicine and cultural agency.