Shaping a Participatory Health Communication Pedagogy with UX and Patient-Agency. (user-experience)

• Date: 22 March 2023
• Author: DeVasto, Danielle,De Hertogh, Lori Beth

Introduction

A primary goal of health and medicine is enacting patient-centered care, or the practice of making patient needs and desires the "centerpiece" of medical care (Berry et al., 2014). We see patient-centered care happening all around us--a nurse who takes extra time to listen to a patient with diabetes; a provider who offers an elderly cancer patient not just one treatment option, but several; a physician who works across areas of specialty to understand a patient as a "whole person." In essence, patient-centered care is just what it sounds like--it's about seeing patients as people and not just as bodies that need repair.

The tenets of patient-centered care are surprisingly similar to an area of study many rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) teacher-scholars are familiar with--user experience. Broadly defined, user experience "focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations" (Usability.gov, n.d.). Like patient-centered care, user-experience (or UX) is about putting people at the center of an experience. It's about designing things like apps, buildings, vehicles, and websites so that anyone, no matter their background or ability, has their needs met. More than usability or accessibility alone, UX is the whole package--it's about understanding and responding to all of a user's abilities and needs.

As RHM teacher-scholars, we see patient-centered care and UX as complementary frameworks that can meaningfully inform teaching approaches in RHM. Our goal, then, in this short article is to conceptualize and share a framework we call a participatory health communication pedagogy. This approach merges UX and patient-centered concepts and practices in order to put students at the center of their classroom learning experiences. While UX and patient-centered care are often topics taught about, we suggest that these frameworks can be actively used in our classrooms by positioning students as both content creators and as content users. As we illustrate throughout, a participatory health communication pedagogy enhances student learning by:

* Centering students as active learners/users who shape their classroom experiences (e.g., course structure, materials, assessment)

* Maintaining a concern for usefulness as defined by the goals and measures of students as well as the instructor, department, or university

* Soliciting input through consistent feedback loops or checkpoints

A participatory health communication pedagogy can be used in any writing studies class, but is especially applicable to RHM courses (1) that already emphasize patient-centered care. For RHM students, we see a particular advantage--a UX-informed pedagogy models the kind of user-centered approaches that can be transferred to students' own professional contexts and approaches to doing patient-centered work. Both within the classroom and as students move beyond it, a participatory health communication pedagogy is an approach that aligns with calls for more socially just pedagogies because it encourages more inclusive and equitable practices that support and respond to a range of users, regardless of their age, gender, race, or ability. As the editors to this special issue point out, such approaches are essential for RHM teacher-scholars to meaningfully address "racism and interlocking systems of oppression" within our teaching and scholarship (Scott, Meloncon, & Molloy, 2020).

Brief Literature Review

Over the last decade, scholars have increasingly considered ways that UX-informed pedagogies can enhance student learning. This is largely because educators have realized that UX principles and practices improve student learning not only in usability courses, but in any course that values diverse and inclusive learning approaches. One such example of the shift toward UX as a pedagogy is Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook's (2022) work on UX as a pedagogical practice. They argue that UX "works beyond a course topic" as a concept that can better engage students and strengthen their learning experiences. In a similar vein, Natasha Jones (2018) in her article, "Human Centered Syllabus Design: Positioning Our Students As Expert End-Users," suggests that first-year writing courses can benefit from adopting a human-centered design approach where students are seen as expert end-users of core pedagogical documents like course syllabi. Similarly, in her collaborative article on user-centered design in the classroom, Ann Shivers-McNair et al. (2018) suggests that writing teachers might further consider the benefits of creating courses that are "designed not only to teach [...] usability testing, but also to be tested for usability" (p. 37). What these scholars illustrate is that there is value in applying (and not just teaching) user-centered approaches in a range of classroom contexts. In other words, there is intrinsic value in seeing the classroom as not just a space for teaching UX, but for enacting it as a pedagogical practice.

We propose that RHM educators are especially well-positioned to apply UX principles to student learning because these courses already often emphasize (either explicitly or implicitly) patient-centered care--a healthcare approach that puts patient needs and preferences at the center of healthcare practices. Like a user-experience approach, a patient-centered care model views the patient not simply as the recipient of a particular experience, product, or treatment but as an empowered agent whose needs and desires are actively responded to. Lisa Meloncon (2017) takes up this line of thinking in her work on "patient experience design" where she argues that technical communicators and healthcare providers must create content that prioritizes and centralizes user/patient needs. Thus, like both patient experience design and user-experience design models, a patient-centered care approach strives...