Presentation
Do Hunter-Gatherers Need Soft Skills? An Anthropological Perspective on How We Train Humans to Work With and Serve Other Humans in Healthcare
DescriptionLiterature in education broadly, and in healthcare education specifically, consistently highlights the importance of “soft skills,” sometimes called “professional competencies,” “human skills,” “non-technical skills,” or “human strengths,” among many labels. These terms collectively index capacities associated with the human dimensions of work: communication, empathy, active listening, cultural competence, collaboration, conflict resolution, and the attunement required to interact meaningfully with others. Alongside this recognition, employers have begun voicing concern about a widening gap between the human strengths they need and the actual interpersonal capacities of new university graduates. Healthcare education echoes these concerns. The AAMC Premed Competencies for Entering Medical Students, for instance, are overwhelmingly soft rather than technical, and the literature routinely calls for deeper attention to the relational dimensions of care. Yet as educators, we increasingly wonder how to cultivate these capacities in students shaped by post-pandemic developmental disruptions, AI-mediated academic habits, and attention environments dominated by social media.
As we center the problem of how to educate humans for human interaction, an inherently anthropological problem, we rarely stop to ask whether we have our anthropology right. Do we understand what we mean when we refer to “the human” in human strengths, human skills, human dimensions, and human factors? By asking if hunter-gatherers have soft skills, we are confronting seldom asked, but fundamental questions: Are soft skills as human, or as humane, as we might imagine? Are soft skills as “soft” (or non-technical skills as non-technical) as we like to think? Are the skills associated with soft skills best thought of as skills at all? Are these terms the best way to help students, or educators, deal with our unruly humanity? This reframing matters because our current language (e.g. soft, non-technical, interpersonal) may obscure more than it clarifies.
In this presentation, I take up these anthropological questions and argue for a different approach to preparing pre-healthcare students, one grounded in deep human needs and capacities for attention, interpretation, and meaning making. Ultimately, this presentation offers a way to think differently about how we train humans to work with and serve other humans in healthcare. It will be valuable for human factors, education, and healthcare professionals who value foundational and critical questions about the relational worlds they inhabit, but who may not have the time or space to ask those questions themselves. It suggests that by revisiting our anthropology, by reconsidering what we think humans are and how humans learn, we may uncover more humane, and more human, ways of preparing the next generation of caregivers.
As we center the problem of how to educate humans for human interaction, an inherently anthropological problem, we rarely stop to ask whether we have our anthropology right. Do we understand what we mean when we refer to “the human” in human strengths, human skills, human dimensions, and human factors? By asking if hunter-gatherers have soft skills, we are confronting seldom asked, but fundamental questions: Are soft skills as human, or as humane, as we might imagine? Are soft skills as “soft” (or non-technical skills as non-technical) as we like to think? Are the skills associated with soft skills best thought of as skills at all? Are these terms the best way to help students, or educators, deal with our unruly humanity? This reframing matters because our current language (e.g. soft, non-technical, interpersonal) may obscure more than it clarifies.
In this presentation, I take up these anthropological questions and argue for a different approach to preparing pre-healthcare students, one grounded in deep human needs and capacities for attention, interpretation, and meaning making. Ultimately, this presentation offers a way to think differently about how we train humans to work with and serve other humans in healthcare. It will be valuable for human factors, education, and healthcare professionals who value foundational and critical questions about the relational worlds they inhabit, but who may not have the time or space to ask those questions themselves. It suggests that by revisiting our anthropology, by reconsidering what we think humans are and how humans learn, we may uncover more humane, and more human, ways of preparing the next generation of caregivers.
Author
Event Type
Oral Presentations
TimeTuesday, March 249:37am - 10:00am EDT
LocationMorgan
Simulation and Education