A Partnership and Collaboration Kicks Off

CSW teachers in a meeting.

Seven Cambridge School of Weston (CSW) faculty visited the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator in early May to flesh out the budding collaboration between both organizations on creating an interdisciplinary curriculum on global and national health for CSW high school students. The seven teachers collectively share 125 years of teaching experience in the subjects of mathematics, science, history, English, and visual arts.

Incubator Director Dr. Sue J. Goldie, staff, and the CSW teachers gathered to explore how they could create an interdisciplinary global health course. Many of the teachers are new to this topic but expressed excitement at the prospect of creating and teaching a course focused on global health. One teacher likened the opportunity of tackling global health to “a canvas in which to learn and try something new.” Since four teachers were new to the collaboration and unfamiliar with the Incubator, Dr. Goldie explained how this collaboration aligned with the Incubator’s core aspirations of:

  • Creating a dialogue about health that encourages those in the health field to think of health more broadly and for those in non-health fields to think about where health issues lurk in their chosen fields;
  • Developing an educational ecosystem that acknowledges the increasingly interdisciplinary lens through which we view the world and the teaching implications of such a shift; and
  • Translating knowledge so that ideas are not concepts to be learned and understood but rather the starting points for making positive and tangible differences in our lives.

Goldie also shared several examples of multimedia teaching videos created by the Incubator to teach health topics.
The idea of knowledge translation or knowledge application resonated with the teachers. Using the context of global health to develop content and put learned skills to use excited them as they considered possibilities for their students and teachers-in-training participating in CSW’s “Progressive Education Lab.” After a morning of dialogue and exchange, the teachers met with Incubator staff to learn more about our educational materials development process and to talk more about some of the ideas inspired by the morning’s discussions.

The CSW teachers left at the end of the day mulling over possibilities, thinking about such topics as: “How can literature be taught through the lens of global health?” and “What would it look like to teach math if we thought about it in the context of an epidemic?” Stay tuned as the collaboration unfolds!

Share on: