Christopher R. Osmond, PhD
Assistant Professor
B.A., 1993, Wesleyan University; M.A. (Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education), 2000, Stanford University; Ph.D. (Culture, Curriculum, and Change), 2006, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; joint appointment as Clinical Assistant Professor of Elementary Education
My research interests are wide-ranging, but find their center in the ways that we understand ourselves as individuals within the professions that define so much of our lives. I began my career as a middle and high school teacher (first of English and Spanish, then of the performing arts) and became consumed with the daily tensions in educational practice between who my students and I actually were and the people that the institution of school required us to be. What really interested both of us needed to be included within the classroom – that was the only way to bring genuine passion and investment to the work – but at the same time we both needed to be “on task,” “focused,” and “appropriate” in order for our shared experience to credibly constitute “school”. Navigating the border between these two demands was a risky but essential enterprise. Since I found that the arts experiences I shared with students were the places where our “real” selves and our “school” selves were most compellingly united, I sought graduate training in the arts, curriculum theory, and teacher education. Rich theorizations of the synergies between how we engage with both art and school gave me language to begin to understand the psychological, social, and cultural forces that come to bear at the intersection of our public and private selves.
This work came to its fullest articulation in a dissertation that collaborated with three public high school English teachers in theorizing the institutional structures of schooling as a public “grid” of measurable objectives that overlaid the inchoate private experiences that we either bring to school or leave at home. I drew deeply upon conceptualizations of liminality and jouissance to account for those fierce and essential energies that enliven educational practice even while they threaten to destabilize rational conceptualizations of learning processes. The work of teaching, I concluded, lay in figuring out how best to navigate the interstices: how best to make those minute-to-minute choices that satisfy our deepest yearnings while still supporting, and being supported by, the institution that makes such satisfactions possible. Publications that have emerged from this focus include a chapter on drama education and the body in the International Handbook of Research on Arts Education (Springer, 2006) and a forthcoming collaborative chapter in The Methodological Dilemma (Routledge).
I came to medical education in 2005, and was thrilled to find that my perseverations on the relationship between private selves and public professions contributed to a rich ongoing discussion of how best to train physicians that includes topics as diverse as professionalism, ethics, curriculum design, and literature and arts in medicine. I work as curriculum consultant on a five-year NIH K07 grant (“Redesigning and Enhancing the Behavioral and Social Science Medical School Curriculum”), a project that supports collaboration with colleagues at eight sister institutions. I am especially interested in that collaboration’s emphasis on how narrative provides a framework within which the power of literary and aesthetic experience can be brought to bear upon the task of training doctors. I also teach courses in using literature to pre-service teachers in the School of Education and give occasional lectures on the arts and education.
You may contact Dr. Osmond by email: osmond@unc.edu; by phone at: (919) 843-8478; or by post at: CB #7240, Department of Social Medicine / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7240.