This case study leverages existing library assets and curated educational resources for students, pastors, and health ministers by seeking to increase their understandings of how religion intersects with, and informs, health education and promotion, and public health more broadly, while equipping them with tools to engage in important conversations about health ministry. This article describes and evaluates a library-based research guide that is a replicable model for collaborative ministerial training about engaging, evaluating, and participating in health education and promotion, which is a vital component of theological education. Much of the pedagogical conversation around religion and health within theological and religious studies has focused on the ways that religion assists in the socio-cultural construction of health and healing. This case study expands on this conversation by detailing how seminary students, pastors, and health ministers can also use public health knowledge to better provide services to their congregations and communities. This model provides long-term, publicly-available, asynchronous access to these materials, making it a valuable resource for theology schools.
Many refugee and immigrant women in the United States experience cultural and language barriers when seeking pregnancy-related medical care. Such barriers may delay needed care and adversely impact birth outcomes. Embrace Refugee Birth Support (Embrace) in Clarkston, Georgia, supports pregnant refugee women by offering birth education classes in the women’s primary languages. Our academic–practice partnership designed and implemented a series of birth education videos for Embrace participants. Based on input from former participants, the partnership team created video scenarios that could be embedded into Embrace’s existing didactic curriculum. The videos addressed common challenges and learning needs identified by previous participants. All videos were filmed in the participant’s primary languages (Swahili and Kinyarwanda) and featured actual Embrace graduates who spoke the languages. Then, Embrace trainers used the video scenarios to augment teaching on birth preparedness and foster participant discussion during class sessions. After implementation, a focus group with participants in the video-expanded class reported the videos were well received, understood, and practically related to their pregnancy needs. Overall, participants reported that video scenarios were an important part of their learning and skill development, as well as a positive experience. Embrace has plans to continue creating native language educational videos for additional languages and birth-related topics. The academic partner’s attempts to measure video impact with standardized quantitative instruments at baseline were terminated. The substantive revisions in data collection strategies highlight the need for cross-cultural flexibility and the potential for unforeseen barriers when using quantitative research tools among non–English-speaking participants.
Writing well is an important skill for graduate students to learn. We contend that viewing the writing process through the lens of storytelling and narrative helps graduate students make clearer, more compelling cases in their academic writing. Mapping the movements of the classic narrative arc onto the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) format of health promotion writing can help authors engage in the writing process more thoroughly because we are socially trained to organize information in narrative forms. This commentary examines the narrative framework in relation to writing, reading, and synthesizing academic literature. We conclude that graduate students will benefit from seeing themselves as health promotion storytellers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.