Using the Creative Arts and Qualitative Ethnography

Dr. Beth P. Velde, East Carolina University, USA

In this mini-chapter Dr. Velde translates the thinking processes she has learned to do when painting watercolors to help her health sciences students develop their critical thinking skills. This lesson is highly creative and yet it calls for the critical thinking skills of analysis, inference, explanation and evaluation. We particularly like this technique for its ability to expose biases behind our clinical judgments in a way that might be more easily remembered because of the visual depiction and might perhaps be more easily transferred to other analysis and critique contexts.