Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Build knowledge and skills around working with others to enable change and empower individuals and communities to improve their health. Provide strategic direction to foment participation, mobilizing resources for health promotion, and build capacity. Use a social ecological framework as a guide to theories and frameworks of health behavior. Students occupy central facilitation role in the classroom to help model and practice health promotion skills.

COURSE DETAILS:

Global public health is increasingly emphasizing the science of “how” along with the science of “what.” Finding the right balance among theory, frameworks, and practice tools is a challenge, especially with the extreme proliferation of literature (published and grey). The course intends to provide a conceptual framework, facilitate use of appropriate resources, and build practical “how” skills to help public health student-professionals become effective agents of change in health promotion initiatives at the individual, organizational, community, and population level, i.e., “enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health” (Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986; WHO 1984).

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

At the end of this course, participants should also be able to:
1.      Appreciate professional tensions facing a health promoter in practice
2.      Appreciate the different roles and skills necessary to bring about change
3.      Describe the role of health promotion for change in global health, from individual to community to population levels
4.      Describe and critically assess a variety of health promotion strategies to influence public health, their advantages and disadvantages, and the challenges involved in their implementation
5.      Explain key criteria for designing health promotion interventions, referencing theory and lessons from the key literature in the field
6.      Describe the importance of and key lessons from the literature about partnerships, coalitions, and community engagement for successful health promotion

Teaching Format: Our class, which meets three hours, once per week, will be co-taught between the professor and students and is designed to encourage experiential learning. We will be modeling and practicing in class many of the substantive techniques that we are learning, including working with others, fomenting participation, active listening, etc. Placing students in the central facilitation role in the classroom is meant to help us explore and experience critical tensions in health promotion including (a) the issue of knowledge and where it resides, (b) how to facilitate a process and (2) how to find one’s role in a group. As such much of our learning will occur as we practice, participate and model in class.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: