#  Global Health Teaching Fellows Explore and Share Ideas 

 





August 30, 2016

 

 

Last Thursday, August 25th during the Derek Bok Center Fall Teaching Conference, Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) members Terry Aladjem and Anshul Kumar led a session designed specifically for Teaching Fellows (TFs) in global health courses. Their mission? To share and develop with these TFs innovative strategies for thinking and teaching about global health.

The pair made use of a conceptual framework of global health which connects three elements: health conditions (the “problem”), the determinants of health (the “context”), and societal responses (the “solutions”). Engaging the idea that health is a fundamental social goal that includes all the world’s populations and peoples regardless of their citizenry or geography, the group sought to develop best principles and practices for teaching global health. Following Kumar’s teaching demonstration, the TFs participated in a “chain-teaching” exercise. They examined the shifting burdens of disease in a changing world drawing on materials developed by Professor Sue J. Goldie for her undergraduate general education course, 'Societies of the World 24: Global Health Challenges.' The group learned from one another as they commented on their own teaching experiences and the different approaches taken by their peers to cover the same materials.

By the session’s end the group developed a set of best teaching practices based on those observations with input from Aladjem and Kumar. General teaching tips included: present with clarity and coherence, ask powerful questions so as to make factual material discussable, and engender motivation and mastery in one’s students. They also thought about those ideas within the context of global health, and discussed how to apply visual and graphical literacy to global heath. The group explored how to move from local to world perspectives in contextualizing health issues, and also talked about how to enlist their own aspirations to address global problems.

Kumar explained, “We developed this workshop with support from the Incubator and the Bok Center to take a simple global health concept and work through how it could be taught to Harvard College students later this fall. Simple practice exercises like these are an essential part of teacher training going into the semester.”

A core function of the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) is to create university-wide spaces for teaching experimentation within the context of global health. Health issues no longer sit alone but play an increasingly critical role in our interdependent world. The Incubator strives to create methods and pedagogies that push students to move beyond the goal of “just learning” about global health to engaging deliberately and deeply about how to think about the health of the world’s populations within the context of globalization.

Future workshops and learning opportunities will be hosted by the Incubator this academic year to support graduate students interested in innovative pedagogy. For TFs who did not have the chance to attend the session but would like to learn more, contact [Terry Aladjem](mailto:aladjem@fas.harvard.edu), Senior Contributor at GHELI, course head in Social Studies, and former Executive Director of the Bok Center.



 

 

 



 

 

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