Tag: humanities concerns

Picture Of Humanities

Our existence has a twin in a general prospect, and that is Humanities. Humanities is the study about human culture, such as literature, philosophy, and history.These have become some of the subjects that conventionally fall under the Humanities umbrella. Expertise on these categories of human aspects give us the opportunity to feel a sense of connection to everyone who have come before us, as well as those who will live after our lifetimes.

We can’t deny that Humanities has contributed a lot. One is how we look at things differently. This illuminates the importance of critical thinking, historical consciousness and creating competent democratic citizens. This allows us to gain a new perception of everything from arts to business models to politics; humanities subjects have been the center of liberal arts tutelage since the ancient Greeks first used them to educate their people.

Inquisitions into human experience speeds up our knowledge about the world. Through the contributions of Humanities scholars, we learn the norms of different cultures, like what goes into creation of art, and how our history was made. Their legacies preserve the great accomplishment of the past, help us to better understand today’s world, and give us ideas on how to rock the future.

Humanities also brings a bit of clarity to the future by providing the conceptual foundation in searching and understanding the human experience. Furthermore, the study of different language can ease the appreciation for the parallelism of cultures .Pondering a sculpture can give an idea on how artist life affects an artistic thinking.

Vigorous, Dynamic and deep that’s what Humanities is and it would until generations to come.

The Significance of Humanities in Nursing

Humanities is the study of human culture. The humanities include human language (ancient or modern), history, literature, law, religion, philosophy and music.  Scholars in humanities are commonly called humanists. A lot of schools and universities offer humanities classes consisting of English literature, arts, and global studies. Nursing education can be counted as one. Thus, nursing students ask how important is humanities to their chosen profession.

Nursing is often defined as both an art and science, but humanities have been hesitatingly been studied in the nursing curricula. However, outbreaks of interest in what is called the “nursing humanities” have become obvious. For instance, literary works are rich sources of not only of information, but illumination as well. The study of art, included in the humanities, can make an important contribution to a nurses’ various ways of knowing what is factual. There are also other complementary ways of knowing like ethical and aesthetical, both included in humanities.

Arts and literature give a meaningful learning experience for nursing students. With their nature, students are encouraged to make discussions made up of different interpretations. This kind of interaction allows participants to learn in ways that call forth new ways of thinking.

There are numerous works of literature and arts that provide rich food for the spirit. Also, it gives insight into the nurse-patient relationship and into an individual’s condition.  Good literature enhances language concepts, words, and vision of human existence. To have a pool of vocabulary is needed to support a patient care. Today, we are suffering from a scarcity in vocabulary which cannot support appropriate discussions of the moral problems and crises that confront humans.

This confronts the relevance of the humanities to nursing. The concepts included in the said study can reflect upon nursing practitioners and education.

Humanities and Medicine

Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field of medicine consisting of the humanities, social sciences and the arts. When we say humanities, it involves different studies like the literature, religion, ethics, philosophy, and history. Social sciences, on the other hand, involve cultural studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, health, and geography. While the arts include theater, literature, film as well as visual arts. These subjects are used to determine the application and relation of specific factors in health and medicine.

Medical humanities is also understood to be an interdisciplinary, and increasingly international undertaking that pulls on the innovative and intellectual skills of diverse disciplines, including literature, art, creative writing, drama, film, music, philosophy, ethical making decisions, anthropology, and history, in pursuit of medical educational goals. This approach to medicine is a wider and generalized view on how individuals are affected by many elements surrounding us.

The health care system recognizes the value of the humanities in preparing health care professionals to tackle the learning and practice of medicine. The interdisciplinary humanities educate students to check out the historical, linguistic, cultural and aesthetic contexts in which we live. It also allows students to discover and attend more fully to the lasting question of what it is to be human and think deeply and critically and react successfully to the complex situations by which we find ourselves.

The intellectual practices of the humanities, along with the expertise in creating a capstone research and studies that deals with the intersection of the humanities and medicine, have the potential to affect students in many ways that will increase their future performance as physicians managing and reaching patients drawn from across different life circumstances and contexts.

The Importance of Humanities in Nursing

When we talk about humanities, we think about it as a branch of science that deals with human nature, but does it have something to do with nursing? This subject is a part of the curriculum of a nursing course as a minor subject or as an elective. It aims to expose the students to a different part of human beings. It gives an idea how people think, react and take action in certain situations they are involved.

 

The geniuses of ancient Greece first used the liberal arts to educate their people. They used poetry, paintings, debates etc to make people enhance their understanding, gain new insights and do critical thinking. Through the study of the humanities, we are able to think creatively, think before acting and apprehend situations.

As a nurse, it is important to gain some knowledge about people. They must be able to have a concrete understanding on how the patients feel about themselves and their condition. The more a nurse understands his or her patient, the more he or she can improve the services, use the proper treatment and approach.

Using the human experience, it will provide us with the knowledge about human nature. The works of the humanities scholars in the past have given us understanding of different cultures, how people develop fear, happiness or loneliness, and the proper approaches. Nursing students must learn this to use humanities in their daily shift. The more a nurse understands the patient, the more efficient they become.

By studying popular literature, nurses are able to know and appreciate life experiences. It will help them in attaining awareness and sensitivity towards the many physical and psychological aspects of an individual’s responses to health, illness and hospitalization. Humanities advertise affection from the hurt and discomfort of the disease. It is recognized as a highly effective teaching tool in a comprehensive program for college students of nursing.

 

Humanities Will Endure

Pay attention to the serious talk around universities, read op-eds and publications and you might think the humanities were in greater risk than the earth’s environment. In fact, despite the overheated stated claims, the humanities are not at death’s door. Modern demands will more likely force them into a new shape, and eventually a healthier one. That claim might seem unusual. The percentage of scholars specializing in the humanities has sunk to an all-time low. Learners have turned their backs on art history and literary works in support of studies like bookkeeping and medical, that leads straight to jobs. Governors like Florida’s Rick Scott have proved helpful to undercut areas of study not tuned carefully to employment. President Obama wants education to stress technology, science, engineering and arithmetic. Resources for disciplines in professions like history and linguistics are drying up. The legislature has already reduced the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities and now Rep. Paul Ryan wants to destroy it.

Analysts of higher education paint a more uncertain image. How many years ago you start counting either degrees or research dollars, determines how depressing the humanities figures look. And with more and more people in America going to college only to qualify themselves for work, most time-honored areas of study have taken a hit, not just the humanities. But even at a conventional, top level organization like Stanford, degrees in humanities professions have dropped so low as to alert teachers into unmatched missionary initiatives.

Whatever precise form changes takes, teachers and their learners are likely to find that the humanities amount to more than a set of separated professions, each stuck on its own island. Ordinary readers might find learned research in art, history and literary works regularly published in language available to them, even released in general-interest publications, as it usually was before 1850. Even political figures may look for the value of erudition efforts. Today’s many humanities jointly form the newest edition of a millennia-long European custom of query into language and its products: inquiry, that is, into worlds that humans have created for themselves and expressed in words. That endeavor will not vanish, even when the present humanities disciplines do.

Digital Humanities

The humanities are in a crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which are a development market. During 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the challenging sub-fields,” a press reporter had written about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even previously, the National Endowment for the Humanities designed its Office of Digital Humanities to help finance projects. And digital humanities is constantly on the go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of colleges with large grants, most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to make a graduate fellowship.

 

Despite all this passion, the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given an acceptable response. Indeed, no one asks it more often than the digital humanists themselves. The latest development of guides on the subject from source books and anthologies to crucial manifestos is an indication of a field undergoing an identity crisis, trying to find out which, if anything, combines the different actions taken on under its advertising. “Nowadays,” says Stephen Ramsay in Interpreting Digital Humanities, “the term can mean anything from press research to digital art, from information exploration to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture supporters, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious fabric.”

These are the types of concerns that humanists ought to be well prepared to answer. Indeed, they are just the latest types of concerns that they have been asking since the Industrial Trend started to make our tools our masters. The position of uncertainty is a wearisome one for the humanities, now perhaps more than ever, when technology is so assured and life is so self-suspicious. It is no wonder that some humanists are influenced to toss off the traditional burden and generate the humanities with the content sources and the militant assurance of the digital. The risk is that they will awaken one morning to find that they have marketed their birthright for a mess of applications.

Humanities Crisis

“Crisis” and “decline” are the terms of the day in conversations of the humanities. A primary stimulus for the issue is a stunning factoid: only 8% of undergraduates major in humanities. But this number is deceiving. It does not consist of degrees in carefully relevant areas such as history, literature and some of the social sciences. Nor does it take consideration of the many needed and optional humanities programs learners take outside their degrees. Most essential, the 8% contains only those with a serious educational interest in literary works, songs and art, not those dedicated to generating the creative works that humanists study.

Once we identify that deeply caring about the humanities (including the arts) does not need specializing in philosophy, English or foreign languages, it’s not at all apparent that there is a crisis of interest in the humanities, at least in our colleges. Is the crisis rather one of severe financial reality? Humanities degrees on average start making $31,000 per year and shift to a normal of $50,000 in their middle years. (The numbers for authors and executing performers are much reduced.) By comparison, company degrees begin with incomes 26% greater than humanities degrees and shift to incomes 51% greater.

But this information does not show that business degrees generate more because they majored in business. Business degrees may well be more enthusiastic about making profits and so agree to jobs that pay well even if they are not otherwise satisfying, whereas individuals enthusiastic about the humanities and the arts may be willing to take more satisfying but lower-paying jobs. Higher education teachers, for example, often know that they could have made far more if they had gone to law school or gotten an M.B.A., but are willing to agree to considerably reduced pay to teach a topic they enjoy.

Humanities and Education

“What’s the objective of learning the humanities: literary works, ‘languages’, philosophy, history and the arts?” You see, hordes of directors orchestrating the financing and therefore developing the framework of college have insisted that it’s essential to develop our universities around the study of “useful” topics, mainly math, chemistry and the managing of international currency, to the near exemption of the humanities. I do not think it’s such a hot idea.

humanitiesAdministrators who market education as a ticket to success instead of interpreting it as process to learning are, basically, suggesting for the training of employees rather than for the training and learning of people. Of course we want our children to discover useful and successful work when they graduate from college, if indeed they are lucky enough to have been able to be present at one. But, we also need to remember that a real education is not simply the acquisition of a set of skills. Each of us, regardless of birth or class, should get to be part of the bigger discussion that life provides. Ever pay attention to what the people who really run things discuss? CEOs, CFOs, political figures from all parties, designers of both ball gowns and software, lyricists, technicians, physicians, art gallery curators and manufacturers of non-reality-based TV programming? They do not talk about work: They find mutual understanding in life. They talk about books, movies, art, music and poems. Maybe they talk about the roller derby; it depends on the audience. You will find physicians studying Alice Munro and technicians grieving the loss of Lou Reed while comparing him to Leonard Cohen.

And there is another reason to study poetry: As one sincere buddy announced, the study of literary works can be validated by the fact that nobody ever thrilled a lady by reciting a formula. Public universities and colleges are in particular risk of contorting and, at their most severe moments, crippling their student body if they define themselves as merely a way for learners to get better jobs. In such a caged perspective, universities are in risk of becoming service institutions: We will train the Workers of the World, sure, only we will not give them anything in the humanities to merge them, motivate them, sensitize them or enlighten them.

Humanities Efforts

Humanities concerns are everywhere, permeating and punctuating the shapes of a life. They are asked on a regular basis by individuals who might not even think of what they are doing as humanistic and are often separated as existential, moral, or individual insights. The concerns, themselves, are about the significance of our world and our life on the world. These are the problems that often keep us up in the evening and are at the middle many coming-of-age experiences. Is there any meaning to my existence? How did we get here? Would my life be worth living if I end up like my parents?

Such concerns lead to the second area in the humanities landscape: humanistic efforts. Questions give rise to and appear as efforts when the problems that preoccupy us get taken up into distributed situations and events. Some illustrations of humanistic efforts consist of talking with buddies at a bar about Cartesian and Lockean concerns of individual identification and determination over time after viewing the movie The Source Code; calling an AM radio station to discuss whether a display of Kara Walker’s work should be prohibited as unpleasant on the reasons that it supports rather than subverts national stereotypes; composing a love poem, participating in a coffeehouse poems slam; referring to the appearance of an artwork or the disfavor of the football commissioner’s rejection to award an ideal activity after a missed call by an umpire; participating in a hip-hop performance or participating in an on-line community in which members are trying to recognize the next victim and killer from Harper’s Island.

Humanities efforts reverberate jointly even as they discover and show the humanities concerns we usually ask alone. Yet, in each example, in both concerns and efforts, there need not be any identification that the expression or conversation is applicable to the humanities. The individuals engaged are not performing as capital-H humanists. Actually, unless the members are academicians or social experts, they are unlikely to be aware of the humanistic custom when participating in humanities concerns and efforts. Nevertheless, these concerns and efforts are unique areas of the humanities scenery.