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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.”

 

     
 

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 WhiteheadGene McFadden &Victor Carstarphen, 1975

 

 
     

 

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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