What Might It Mean to Embrace Emancipatory Pedagogy in Medical Education?

Abstract

An emerging and important goal of professional health training and education is to develop a workforce that is equipped to address patients’ social and structural determinants of health and to contribute to health equity. However, current medical education does not adequately achieve this vision. Emancipatory teaching, as described by scholars such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks, equips students with tools to identify and challenge oppressive systems. It helps students achieve freedom for themselves, thereby contributing to more emancipatory and humanistic patient care. Changing teaching in this way would help reverse implicit curricular values that tend to enshrine hierarchy and oppression. Humanities and bioethics scholars working within health professional schools thus should promote a more critical, emancipatory pedagogy in their institutions.