"I Left the Museum Somewhat Changed": Visual Arts and Health Ethics Education

A common goal of ethics education is to equip students who later become health practitioners to not only know about the ethical principles guiding their practice, but to also autonomously recognize when and how these principles might apply and assist these future practitioners in providing care for patients and families. This article aims to contribute to discussions about ethics education pedagogy and teaching, by presenting and evaluating the use of the visual arts as an educational approach designed to facilitate students' moral imagination and independent critical thinking about ethics in clinical practice. We describe a sequence of ethics education strategies over a 3 year Doctor of Physiotherapy program, focusing on the final year professional ethics assessment task, which involved the use of visual arts to stimulate the exploration of ethics in healthcare. The data (in the form of student essays about their chosen artwork) were analyzed using both thematic and content analysis. Two key themes centered on emotional responses and lateral thinking. The use of artwork appeared to facilitate imaginative, emotional, and conceptual thinking about ethics and clinical experience (both past and future). This study provides some evidence to support the effectiveness of the use of the visual arts in promoting students' recognition of ethical dimensions within their clinical experience and reflection on their emerging professional identity. As one student noted, she left the museum "somewhat changed."