On Wednesday, August 3, Incubator Director Sue J. Goldie and a multidisciplinary teaching team from the Cambridge School of Weston (CSW) met to discuss the development of two new capstone integrative courses at the school that will draw on global health topics.
The four teachers and Professor Goldie spent the afternoon identifying the learning objectives and skills that students should gain by the courses’ end. Each two-person team is comprised of a math and a humanities educator, and although the teams will be team-teaching each teacher has chosen a specific topic on which to focus during the course. One class, offered for upperclassmen, will use the topics of malaria and Hurricane Katrina as vehicles for math and English learning. The other, for freshmen and sophomores, will introduce new concepts and skills—including decision making in the face of uncertainty—through the examples of adolescent well-being and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Professor Goldie shared with the teachers the global health framework she has developed to identify and analyze an issue’s causes, challenges, and solutions. She noted that health conditions and their effects are often shaped by factors outside the health sector—the “social determinants” of health like education, poverty, and environmental factors. Similarly, solutions to health problems often emerge from non-health fields. Acknowledging the interconnections between health and non-health sectors is therefore essential to understanding and tackling complex global health challenges.
CSW’s integrated studies courses provide an opportunity to foster this kind of interdisciplinary thinking among students. As one teacher remarked, “An integrative studies class is like baking a cake. Something comes from the blend of ingredients that enables our students to expand how they learn and solve problems.” Professor Goldie added, “It would be an amazing accomplishment if each student left the course with a global perspective—understanding why this topic matters to me, my larger community, the world, and even the planet.”
In addition to their curriculum planning, the group discussed how they would evaluate their courses. Does evaluation look different in an integrative course than in other courses? Why? They all agreed that assessing students’ engagement was critical, but how do they measure it? While the group didn’t reach a conclusion, they felt that developing a clear rubric was critical and would ultimately give both teachers and students more freedom to delve into the subject matter and take risks with both learning and teaching.
Finally, the group explored how to find high-quality materials on which to base their curriculum. Professor Goldie shared with the group her process for finding resources as she prepares to teach a course—acknowledging that one of the challenges was how to approach a complex topic without being completely submerged in an endless stream of information. “Look for the corners of a topic,” she advised, “and use that as a guide.” For global issues, that means beginning with the most definitive global report on the topic. These reports, typically published annually or every several years by international organizations like the World Health Organization or the United Nations, share similar blueprints that are useful for getting grounded in a topic: they are based on up-to-date global data that’s been vetted and standardized, they offer a short executive summary, and they often include common sections focused on the topic’s “challenges” and “solutions.” Country profiles are frequently published with these reports, and hold tremendous teaching potential for educators who wish to compare and contrast national or regional contexts using consistent data. These reports are also often accompanied by a press release, which Goldie noted is “the absolute entry point into a topic as it offers a succinct summary” of the issue.
To supplement these core reports, Professor Goldie searches for additional materials such as annual reports on the topic, position papers, and journal articles. She also noted that she sometimes pulls articles or other content from the media to spark discussion and critical thinking among students.
At the end of the meeting Professor Goldie gave each teacher a stack of resources related to their topic, along with some “homework”: read their materials and start to develop their respective portions of their class more fully. The Incubator will continue to work with these Cambridge School of Weston faculty to pilot their interdisciplinary global health modules during the 2016-17 academic year.