“How specifically do you educate or raise awareness?” Taisuke Sato—a junior at the Cambridge School of Weston (CSW)—posed the question to the Incubator’s Instructional Design Specialist, Nina Bhattacharya. Near the end of the school year, Sato had reached out to learn more about the Incubator’s efforts to develop novel teaching and learning tools on core global health topics.
The Incubator and CSW first partnered in 2015 on a series of faculty workshops on global health. Since then, Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie has collaborated closely with CSW faculty develop a multi-part integrated studies course. The integrated course introduced students to an interdisciplinary global health framework, then incorporated global health concepts, ideas, resources, and tools with biological science, mathematics, art, and literature.
Sato was part of this integrated course and had joined his algebra teacher, Agnes Voligny, for a visit to the Incubator in 2016. Through a faculty immersion residency, Voligny had worked with Dr. Goldie and her staff to develop a year-long curriculum of innovative algebra modules teaching math through a social justice lens. This integrated course and his initial visit, shared Sato, completely shifted the way he understood and analyzed public health problems.
During the interview with Bhattacharya, Sato discussed how he leveraged Dr. Goldie’s global health framework to think through complicated health conditions and responses. “I often start with the question ‘why.’ For example, if you say there are not enough doctors in Bangladesh, I might ask, ‘Why aren’t there enough doctors?’ Maybe there are not enough medical schools,” explained Sato. “By the time I ask four ‘why’ questions, I am better able to figure out the responses to a problem.”
The rest of Sato’s thoughtful conversation with Bhattacharya included topics like adolescent mental health, the connection between economics and health, and global health issues that fly under the radar, like road safety. Throughout the interview, Bhattacharya emphasized the Incubator’s vision to unpack these “messy” problems in the classroom by developing tools that can be quickly piloted, iterated, and tested again.
“We are at a moment where people are remixing what it means to be in education and what it means to learn,” concluded Bhattacharya. “And the Incubator is a part of this ongoing conversation.”