Curiosity, astonishment, and more than one smile crossed the faces of Harvard College students as they received a bundle of markers and a few sheets of paper while walking into class. Professor Sue J. Goldie, faculty director of GHELI, was already at the front of the classroom, sketching a quick visual framework on the board in colored chalk. Over the course of the next two hours students put their own markers to work, learning to organize their thinking about core concepts in global health—like demography and migration—and approaches to analyzing health problems and responses.
This global health “crash course” was part of an ongoing collaboration between GHELI and Professor Doris Sommer on her new Harvard College course, Aesthetic and Interpretative Understanding 13 (AI 13): “Rx: Arts for Global Health.” For years, Professor Sommer—a faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and faculty director of the Cultural Agents Initiative—has taught courses on how the arts can be leveraged to improve society. This fall, following up on a theater project she spearheaded to train community health workers in Peru, Professor Sommer decided to overhaul her course and teach specifically on arts and global health.
The partnership kicked off with multiple visits by Professor Sommer to GHELI to meet with faculty director Sue Goldie, Senior Contributor Terry Aladjem, and Pedagogy Fellow Anshul Kumar. GHELI also welcomed Pier Luigi Sacco, professor of Cultural Economics at IULM University, Milan, who will be involved in the course as a guest lecturer, at one of these meetings. Each meeting embodied the intellectual rigor, dynamism, and creativity for which Sommer and Goldie are both known.
Professor Goldie’s guest lecture, leveraging the Incubator’s visual-based approaches to innovative teaching and learning, provided a global health foundation for students to anchor their aesthetic reflections and investigations during the rest of the semester. Professor Goldie also curated an extended resource collection on arts, culture, and global health for Professor Sommer and her team of graduate teaching fellows. GHELI, in its role as a hub for global health educators and instruction, plans to provide ongoing support as the AI 13 instructional team delivers the new course over the fall.