Background
The Young Leaders in Global Health (YLGH) Club strives to share the benefits of higher education with surrounding communities through multisectoral collaboration and community engagement. The Medical English Program (MEP) initiative, led by the YLGH club, aims to achieve this mission by working with hospitals in Kunshan to provide a language course for medical workers who wish to become more proficient in English for professional and career development purposes. Through collaboration with DKU’s Language and Culture Center (LCC), we train our volunteers to become successful teachers and content developers. We teach both on-site at hospitals and online. However, in lieu of the COVID-19 pandemic, we currently only offer online lessons via Zoom. Our content will be based on real-world scenarios in the medical field, in which doctors and medical workers can apply what they learn in real-life situations and settings. Both teachers and content developers will gain not only exposure to the medical field by preparing lessons on topics such as anatomy, diagnosis, and surgery procedures, but more importantly, the intercultural interaction experience from class discussion and activities.
History
In November 2019, a group of undergraduate students (Caroline Robbins, Joy Xiao, May Thongthum, and Reika Shimomura) reached out to Professors Joseph and Laura Davies to discuss their plans for the “Medical English Project.” However, the project was put on hold as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The team reunited again in June 2020 to move the project forward.
Our first session of teaching began in Summer 2020. We developed content and taught doctors and nurses from The Third People’s Hospital of Kunshan twice a week for 7 weeks as a trial run. Then, we lowered meeting times each week to once a week in our second session of MEP and expanded session length to 14 weeks. After receiving feedback that 14 weeks was too long, we ultimately settled on class once a week for 7 weeks. We hope to determine an appropriate length for the teaching sessions for consistency. In summary, we have organized a total of 3 sessions in the following order: Summer 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021.
The MEP team has made great progress throughout the 2020-2021 Academic Year. We began our project with just 4 members and have since then expanded to over 15 total members. Our members include those part of the core team [link to People page], those who are teachers, and those who are content developers. Each year, MEP will have two recruitment periods before the beginning of each academic semester. This year, we have not only expanded our volunteers throughout the undergraduate student body but have even managed to recruit a graduate student and a student from Suzhou University to our team.
Goals
To establish an effective Medical English course for doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners working in Kunshan by addressing specific professional language needs.
To provide students interested in language teaching and healthcare education with personal and professional development opportunities through practical experiences.
To promote university-wide local community engagement through multisectoral collaboration and community-service volunteering program development.
