Community Engaged Teaching, Research and Practice: A Catalyst for Public Health Improvement

Abstract

The interdisciplinary field of public health promotes health among populations. Complex public health needs persist in the United States, influenced largely by social and structural determinants. Viable solutions require creativity and a commitment to change the status quo, facilitated by collaborative problemsolving. Public health education programs in the United States have a role in developing a workforce that is equipped to support these processes. Cornell University's Master of Public Health (MPH) Program sought to identify opportunities to simultaneously support student learning, community capacity development, and community-centered action for public health improvement. A sequential two-phased approach was used to define curricular components and indicated pedagogical methods. Two key themes emerged: alignment of skills and abilities needed and desired by current and future public health workers and the strategic role community engaged learning could play in advancing learning and improving public health. Community engaged learning was specifically adopted as the primary pedagogical approach for a series of three courses in the Cornell MPH Program, focused on needs assessment, intervention planning, and monitoring and evaluation for improvement. These courses were designed with community collaborators, with goals to build student knowledge and community capacity in 12 domains and improve community health outcomes via collaborative work. Public health protects and improves the health of people by preventing disease and promoting health among populations, with the goal of ensuring population-wide physical, mental, and social well-being (DeSalvo, O'Carroll, Koo, Auerbach, & Monroe, 2016; DeSalvo et al., 2017). Despite advances in knowledge and medicine, public health needs persist in the United States, influenced largely by social and structural determinants (factors such as equity in access to education, housing, employment, safe neighborhoods, and health services, and policies and systems that support this) and affect people and communities disproportionately, often delineated by racial,

Facilitated Asynchronous Online Learning to Build Public Health Strategic Skills

“…To increase the potential for long-term impact—both retention of learning and application of learning for action27,30—we developed applied activities and accountability checks throughout the curriculum. To support online course completion rates, we integrated both student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions and motivational pushes, including earning a certificate, a fee, and workplace sponsorship 31,32…”

Faculty as Designers of Authentic Learning Projects in Online Courses

“…It originated from medical education and health related professions (McGaghie et al, 1978), and it is built around "functions" or competencies required for practice in a given professional setting (McGaghie et al, 1978). A competency-based approach entails innovative ways to design curricula to equip students with strategic skills and practices consistent with community and workforce needs (Coombe et al, 2020;Meredith et al, 2020;Pfeiffer et al, 2013). In the context of public health training, the CEPH accrediting body (CEPH, 2016) strongly emphasizes competencies.…”

“…In the United States, most public health training programs are informed and accredited by national standards (Meredith et al, 2020), with the most recent accreditation standards released in 2016 by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH, 2016). These standards set forth competencies that reflect the practical realities of the work of public health professionals, and training programs place a significant emphasis upon authentic learning to meet those national accreditation standards.…”

The engagement CUBE: a dialogical tool for designing, facilitating and monitoring engaged research and teaching strategies

“…Students, professionals and citizens, academics and non-academics taking part in shared knowledge creation and transfer processes, tailored to local needs (Baccarne et al , 2016). Not only the individual participants but also the involved organisations and/or communities can/should benefit, by way of empowerment, more safe and sound procedures, practices, working conditions and livelihoods (Bringle, 2017; Meredith et al , 2020).…”