3DT3 Student Work and Writing Exemplars
Selected excerpts illustrating how students engage with complexity, uncertainty, and adaptive problem diagnosis
The excerpts below are drawn from student writing across multiple offerings of HTHSCI 3DT3. They are presented anonymously and largely verbatim, with only minor edits for clarity. They are not intended to showcase “best answers,” but to reflect how students learn to slow down, refine their thinking, and remain present with problems that resist easy resolution.
Writing in this course is used as a tool for diagnosis rather than persuasion. Students are asked to surface tensions, values, losses, and responsibilities, often before they fully understand what they think. What follows reflects that practice.
Case Reflection and Problem Refinement
Assignment context
This assignment recurs throughout the course. Students revisit a case after discussion and are asked to refine their understanding of the problem rather than defend an initial position or propose solutions. The emphasis is on diagnosis: what kind of problem this is, who is implicated, and what losses are being protected. You can read the description here.
What students are practicing
Students practice resisting premature action, identifying adaptive dimensions of cases, and noticing how their own discomfort shapes interpretation. The work often involves letting go of early certainty and tolerating ambiguity.
Student excerpts
“At first, I thought the problem in this case was about consent and process. That felt concrete and manageable. But the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that framing the problem that way allowed me to avoid something harder. The real challenge seemed to be about responsibility and trust, and about who is expected to carry the emotional weight when decisions have no clean outcome. I noticed how often I wanted to narrow the problem so that it could be solved, rather than staying with the fact that it might need to be lived with.”
“I kept returning to my original problem statement and realizing how much of it was shaped by my own need for clarity. Each time I tried to make the problem more precise, I was also making it smaller. What changed for me was recognizing that the ambiguity wasn’t a flaw in the case, but part of the case itself. The tension between policy, practice, and human experience could not be resolved without loss, and my earlier framing had ignored that.”
“What surprised me most was how uncomfortable it felt to stop proposing solutions. I had been rewarded for problem-solving for most of my academic life, and this assignment forced me to sit with the realization that naming the problem accurately might be the most responsible action available.”
Staying with the problem
These excerpts demonstrate how students learn to resist premature closure and shift from solution-seeking to disciplined problem diagnosis. Excellent work in this assignment shows a willingness to let go of early certainty, to notice how personal discomfort shapes interpretation, and to stay with ambiguity long enough for a more accurate framing of the challenge to emerge. The strength of the writing lies not in clarity of answer, but in clarity of responsibility.
Guest Speaker Reflections
Assignment context
These reflections follow sessions with donor families, recipients, and donation coordinators. Students are not permitted to take notes during the sessions and are asked to write from memory and emotional residue rather than transcription. You can read the description here.
What students are practicing
Students practice disciplined listening, emotional restraint, and reflection without immediate analysis. The assignment is designed to interrupt habitual academic distancing and allow lived experience to remain intact.
Student excerpts
“When the donor family spoke, I felt an immediate urge to organize their story into arguments and themes. Not being able to take notes made that impossible. I had to sit with the weight of what they were saying instead of turning it into something useful. I noticed how uncomfortable that was, and how often I rely on structure to protect myself from emotion.”
“I kept waiting for the moment where the story would resolve into something clear or instructive, but it never did. That unsettled me. I realized how much I expect learning to feel tidy, and how unprepared I was to simply witness something painful without trying to fix it.”
“What stayed with me most was the silence afterward. No one rushed to speak. It felt heavy, but also respectful. In that moment, I understood why you told us that silence was part of the work. It created space for the experience to land rather than be immediately processed away.”
Listening without fixing
These reflections show students learning to listen without immediately organizing, analyzing, or resolving what they hear. The strongest work captures the discipline of presence and the courage to allow lived experience to remain intact, even when it is unsettling. What distinguishes excellent reflection here is restraint: the ability to let silence, memory, and emotional residue do the teaching.
Now That You Know
Assignment context
This assignment was given in conjunction with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Students were asked to reflect on how learning about organ donation, transplantation, and health systems intersects with histories of colonial harm, mistrust, and inequity in healthcare. The task was not to express opinion or arrive at moral certainty, but to examine how new knowledge alters responsibility, particularly when learning exposes harm that cannot be undone.
Students were invited to write from a place of implication rather than distance, acknowledging what becomes harder to ignore once something is understood.You can read the description here.
What students are practicing
In this assignment, students practice sitting with moral complexity without resolving it. They are asked to recognize that learning can create obligation, discomfort, and loss of innocence, and to reflect on how knowledge reshapes identity, responsibility, and future action.
Student excerpts
“Before this assignment, I believed that learning about injustice would naturally lead to clarity about what to do. Instead, I felt more uncertain than ever. Understanding the history of harm in healthcare did not give me answers; it gave me responsibility. I could no longer pretend that good intentions were enough, or that neutrality was possible.”
“I struggled with the urge to write something that sounded respectful rather than something that was honest. What stopped me was realizing that honesty required acknowledging my own position in the system, and how easily I benefit from structures that harm others. That realization was deeply uncomfortable, and I am still unsure what to do with it.”
“This assignment forced me to confront the idea that knowledge is not passive. Once I learned more about the relationship between medicine and Indigenous communities, I could not unknow it. The hardest part was recognizing that this knowledge does not come with a clear path forward, only the responsibility to act more carefully and to listen more deeply.”
“I realized that what I wanted most was reassurance that I was ‘doing the right thing.’ What this assignment taught me instead was that responsibility often means acting without that reassurance, and being willing to carry uncertainty rather than resolve it.”
When knowing becomes responsibility
This work represents some of the most rigorous and courageous writing in the course. The excellence here lies not in moral clarity, but in moral restraint: students demonstrate an ability to remain implicated without collapsing into defensiveness, guilt, or premature resolution. These excerpts show learning that alters identity and responsibility, and writing that reflects the seriousness of knowledge that cannot be set aside once encountered.
This assignment reflects a core teaching stance in the course: that adaptive learning often involves loss, discomfort, and uncertainty, and that the work is not to resolve these tensions, but to learn how to carry them with integrity.
Critical Connections
Assignment context
In this assignment, students connect course material to media coverage, public discourse, or policy debates. The goal is not critique for its own sake, but disciplined examination of how narratives shape understanding and action. You can read the description here.
What students are practicing
Students practice holding multiple perspectives, resisting oversimplification, and examining how public framing influences trust, fear, and decision-making.
Student excerpts
“As I analyzed media coverage of organ donation, I noticed how quickly complex situations were turned into stories of blame. That framing made me uncomfortable once I began to see what it erased: uncertainty, competing values, and human cost.”
“I found myself wanting to defend one side of the debate, but the more closely I read, the more I realized that the framing itself was the problem. It limited what could be said and who could be heard.”
“This assignment made me realize how easily public narratives can distort reality. What felt like clear moral positions in the media became much more complicated when placed alongside the lived experiences we encountered in class.”
Seeing the system, not just the story
These excerpts demonstrate students’ growing capacity to hold multiple perspectives without collapsing complexity into blame or certainty. Strong work in this assignment shows careful attention to framing, narrative, and omission, and an emerging awareness of how public discourse shapes trust and action. The excellence here lies in disciplined restraint and systems-level thinking rather than argumentation.
A note on learning through writing
Across these assignments, students frequently describe frustration with the volume of writing and the absence of clear answers. Over time, many come to see writing not as a way to demonstrate mastery, but as a way to think more honestly about problems that resist resolution.
This page reflects that process. The work remains unfinished by design.