Teaching Public
Health Symposium Held At Boston University
Participants
Challenged To Rethink and Redesign Higher Education
A day-long symposium on teaching public health
involving more than 30 speakers took place at Boston University in
March of this year. The symposium was prompted by an unmet need to
reform public health education for the 21st century.
Key Presentation
A key
presentation by Laura Magaña,
the President of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public
Health, sought to convey several key messages about public health
education.
The advances in the education have lagged seriously behind advances in
many other sectors of society such as transportation, entertainment,
banking, and others. Classrooms today look the same as they did
decades ago with a lecturer at the front and students in the rest of
the room. According to Magaña, teachers need a new mindset to
revolutionize education and adapt it to the new economy. The
requirements for students going forward are talent, creativity,
flexibility, and innovation, she said.
Vision
Magaña’s vision for public health education comprises
seven elements. They are:
1. Education must shift from being a one-time event to
being a process of life-long learning. This will mean students must be
given the opportunities for multiple re-entries into the system.
2. At present, schools have the same entry and
graduation requirements for everyone which leads to students having a
common experience. Going forward, multiple entries and exits should
make it possible for students to have unique experiences.
3. Schools should focus less on transmitting knowledge
since it doubles every 13 months and soon will double every 11 hours
and more on developing competencies or literacy in data, technology,
and in learning and adapting rapidly.
4. Flexible curricula should replace static curricula
5. Learning should take place in different settings
such as on campus, online, and on the job.
6. New roles for faculty are envisaged, including
designing learning scenarios, tracing students careers throughout
their professional careers, mentoring instead of lecturing,
interpreting performance dashboards, and coaching.
7. Public health education will have to be delivered
not only be a single institution but by alliances and networks with
other education providers.
Call To
Action
Magaña
issued a call to action for the public health community to rethink and
redesign the complete higher education system. She urged her audience
to take the lead in educational change by creating opportunities to
think about the challenges such as occurred at this BU symposium and
to involve different actors inside and outside of the health sector.
She closed by quoting John Maynard Keynes saying “the
difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping
from old ones.”
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The symposium
sought to excite and inspire participants
in their reform efforts by sharing lyrics from
"Wake Up Everybody" a song by
Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes:
Wake up everybody no more sleepin' in bed
No more backward thinkin' time for thinkin' ahead
The world has changed so very much
From what it
used to be
There is so much hatred war an' poverty
Wake up all
the teachers time to teach a new way
Maybe then they'll listen to whatcha have to say
'Cause they're the ones who's coming up and the world is in
their hands
When you teach the children teach em the very best you can
The world won't get no better if we just let it
be
The world won't get no better we gotta change it yeah, just you
and me
Written by
John Whitehead, Gene
McFadden &Victor
Carstarphen, 1975
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Symposium Topics
Among the broad topic areas covered were:
·
Teaching Public Health: Past and Present
·
Active Learning
·
Engaging Students
·
Diversity and Inclusion
·
Enhancing the Educational Experience
·
Public Health Teaching in Non-Traditional Settings
·
Public Health Teaching Across the Lifecourse
Some of
the specific topics covered in these presentations were:
A
Conceptual Orientation to Public Health Teaching
Teaching
by the Case Method
Practice-Based Teaching and Learning
James
Wolff
Maximizing Student Engagement
Effective Teaching in Diverse Classrooms
Teaching with Technology: Incorporating Technology in the Classroom
Public
Health for High School Students
Undergraduate Education in Public Health
Community Colleges and Public Health
Education
Lifelong Learning
Challenges, Promise, and Potential: the Future of Public Health
Access
to Videos
Readers can listen to many of these presentations which
were recorded on video and access the slides of several of the
speakers at:
https://tinyurl.com/y7sxl6gl
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