| Summary: | Standardized Patients (SPs) are lay persons who are employed extensively within health professional education to help teach and assess a range of clinical skills. Individuals trained to take on the physical, historical and emotional aspects of patient stories are integral to the dissemination of collective attitudes, values, and beliefs about what it means to be a competent health professional. As an embodied affective presence literally in front of and often in physical contact with health professionals SPs are a fertile site of knowledge production as well as transformative learning. Their unique contribution is a corollary of both their location as non-clinicians and their pedagogical facility with embodied emotions and affect.
SPs in medical education teach about emotion and affect, engage affectively in the presentation of clinical material and as a professionalizing group have developed an
educational methodology for facilitating understanding and experience of emotion and affect.
In this thesis I examine the field of human simulation and the work of standardized patients (SPs) through critical theoretical perspectives seeking to broaden our understanding of their contributions as a present and future force in health professional education, specifically medical education. Central to my examination is the constitutive role of emotion and affect as they are conceived both within medical education and engaged by standardized patients as media through which different knowledges are produced.
My analysis is shaped by poststructuralist feminist writers on emotion, Michel Foucault’s genealogical historical approach, and principally Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s alternative nomadology as theorized in a thousand plateaus (1987). I intend an alternative reading of the advent of SPs in medical education through a process of mapping rhizomatic networks that include acting, emotion, affect, medicine, and the place of women patients and standardized patients in medical arenas.
I have located the current study within an ongoing project of embodied ethical practice and nomadic subjectivity within education specific to human simulation and standardized patients.
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