Students who register for Communication Arts Professor Jenell Johnson’s Health and Rhetoric course (aka Comm Arts 317) for spring semester will find themselves tackling a forest of fascinating questions—what does the concept of “health” mean to different groups, races and genders? How do culture and language impact the ways individuals receive medical information and interact with doctors? What role does the news media play in understanding health issues?
Through focused discussion sessions and a graphic narrative contest similar to the ethics cartooning contest run by the Morgridge Institute for Research, students will examine these issues up close, while also learning how to become more informed and empowered patients. In the past, the class has attracted a mix of pre-med students and humanities students.
Johnson’s class is the latest offering in the College of Letters & Science’s Constellations program, a set of annual courses designed to spark interest in the humanities among UW undergraduates, regardless of their major or career trajectory. The courses fulfill general education requirements and can help students earn credits toward a variety of established certificate programs. Participating professors design courses that zero in on contemporary issues in rigorous, thoughtful, innovative ways.
“We often frame our Constellations courses to think through big questions,” says Johnson, who has been teaching as part of the program since 2018. “Students examine the role of personal narratives and cultural stories in shaping what health means and how it functions in the world—for example, how doctors and nurses use platforms like TikTok and Reddit to talk about the trauma they deal with in caring for COVID patients.”
Andrea Samz-Pustol, the newly hired assistant director of the program who began this summer, says the idea is to build a bridge between the humanities and the rest of campus.
"We’re trying to show students that the critical thinking skills you learn in the humanities can be applied to just about anything you might choose to pursue,” she says.
Last spring, Giuliana Chamedes, the Mellon-Morgridge Professor of Humanities, taught a Constellations course entitled War, Race and Religion in Europe and the United States. Her class featured serious discussions about the history of fascism and racism, but also involved students developing video-based research projects and presenting them to students from Madison's East High School. In May, the two groups—UW-Madison undergraduates and high schoolers—took a field trip together to Special Collections at Memorial Library, where archivists let them hold and examine historical documents and artifacts from the 18th century to the present.
In addition to appreciating the community service aspect, Chamedes says both groups enjoyed the experience in the library. The high schoolers got a first-hand look at what the college experience at UW-Madison can look like, while the Constellations students saw how their research, writing and storytelling skills could have an impact on a real-life audience.
“For everyone to go to the library and be able to touch an 18th-century manuscript, they had never done that before,” says Chamedes. “That just brought out the importance of listening to the sources in a totally different way. And the fun of getting to work with these quirky materials the archivists had pulled, like board games and pop-up books from the Cold War. It was empowering for them to think about constructing their understanding of the past based on this material.”
Samz-Pustol has been thrilled to see the Constellations program explode in popularity in recent years—Johnson’s course initially had a capacity of only 20 students in 2018, the year the first Constellation courses debuted. Now it registers 80. Overall, there has been a 350 percent increase in enrollment in all Constellations courses since the program began.
As new faculty members cycle in, Samz-Pustol and Constellations Director Nathan Phelps plan to expand the program’s galaxy further, developing more thought-provoking course offerings, including a course focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. In fall 2023, Ralph Grunewald, a professor of English currently teaching a Constellations course on the criminal justice system in America, will debut a new course that digs into our modern fascination with true crime podcasts and TV shows, and what that means for our perception of criminal justice.
“We have a feeling that one’s going to be pretty popular,” says Samz-Pustol.