The Art of Public Health Education
Creative play with colored markers in a graduate public health course? Absolutely! Indeed, the use of creative visual representation can be an empowering tool in innovative pedagogy that inspires transformative change.
Thus it was that incoming MPH students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health spent four days in their Orientation Week practicing artistic expression to understand health conditions, determinants, and responses. More than 400 students attended the pilot non-credit “Fundamental Concepts of Public Health” mini-course from August 25-28, 2015. The class was co-taught by former HSPH Dean Julio Frenk, now President of the University of Miami, and Professor Sue J. Goldie, Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health and Director of the Center for Health Decision Science at HSPH, and the Director of the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University. Dr. Cherie Ramirez, Deputy Director of the Incubator’s Learning Studios, also played an instrumental role in the planning and facilitation of the four-day mini course. Each day, students attended both a large-group event, led by the two faculty, and small group sections where they worked in teams to debrief and unpack lecture nuggets and apply color and art across white boards to illustrate and explain concepts to one another. Sessions were dynamic as students had fun learning while establishing new colleagues for life.
Frenk and Goldie had developed the pilot after years of observing gaps and disparities in what students know and how they think about public health when they first arrive at HSPH. Providing a unified curriculum before students embarked on their specific areas of study, they reasoned, could address these particular gaps in a way that might ensure that new students walk into their first day of formal classes informed and inspired: informed about contemporary challenges, emerging trends, and unanswered questions; and inspired about the possibilities for transformative change, and the fundamental role they can play in the years ahead. The course aimed to equip students with a flexible conceptual framework for critically thinking about population health globally – meaning both at home and abroad – that they can apply in the years ahead, both during their time at the School and throughout their careers.
Graphic thinking based in creative experimentation with visual media communication is a strength of the new Incubator. Such an approach enables cross-disciplinary thinking to connect many different aspects of public health leadership. Most graduates in public health subspecialties will, for example, need to communicate and teach at some level using methods that arrive at a shared objective in the policy world. This can only be done with respecting and appreciating other perspectives. “Drawing,” Goldie remarked, “enables us to look at several ideas simultaneously, which is especially important given that cognitively human beings typically have trouble holding more than two to three ideas in their minds.” Moreover, Frenk added, “schematic models are powerful and illustrate points clearly in a way that words may not.” Both Goldie and Frenk cautioned against the danger of oversimplifying when using drawing techniques. Goldie advised the students especially when working with subject experts to “acknowledge that frameworks don’t always capture complexity but they are a useful tool for including others in the dialogue and possibly inspiring new connections and thoughts.”
The course incorporated experimental video, on-site taped interviews, and low-key support of the Incubator’s expert staff in high-tech visuals. In addition, the course drew on the skills and enthusiasm of more than a dozen doctoral student teaching fellows, facilitation support from several members of the Incubator’s senior staff, assistance from the HSPH Office of Student Affairs, and the support of interim Dean David Hunter. Course content was rooted in and supplemented by a more extensive 12-module curriculum and interactive e-book developed and taught by Dean Frenk during 2014 and 2015, as well as fundamental framework principles Goldie has taught over many years in her Harvard College general-education course “Societies of the World 24—Global Health Challenges: Complexities of Evidence-based Policy.”