Abstract
The year 2020 highlighted significant health disparities in global population outcomes and forces a critical evaluation of learning and teaching in health promotion. More so than ever, health promotion demands graduates underpin their practice with a critical realist perspective and are ever-vigilant advocates in tackling constructs of power and privilege. These new-world-order graduates have the foresight and fortitude to call out injustice, to truly promote equity, and ensure all populations have the same start to healthy and productive lives. Essentially, health promotion graduates are practice savvy, socially conscious, politically astute, and creatively entrepreneurial to respond in unprecedented circumstances. To this end, health promotion educators are mandated to be ahead of the game and design courses to graduate global citizens cognizant of local practice environments in a global context. This editorial emboldens dialogue about the challenges of graduating health promotion practitioners who can acclimatize to multifaceted and swiftly moving contemporary milieu infused with evolving social consciousness and implied social decrees on a stage of neoliberalist ideologies, bureaucratic inaction, and political rhetoric.
This editorial urges health promotion educators to progress the following pedagogical dialogues. The first dialogue is about reframing the classroom. The health promotion classroom can favour traditional pedagogies, yet learning and teaching is more complex, dynamic, and demanding than ever. Pedagogy theorists such as Biggs write about learning and teaching as a social endeavor and the democratic classroom. These classroom approaches refresh health promotion pedagogies by illuminating how graduates understand human interactions and set the premise for progressing social endeavors and humanitarian philosophies (McBride & Kanekar, 2015). The second dialogue is about progressing graduate capabilities. The practice standards for health promotion are based on core competencies or qualifications. However, health promotion increasingly demands graduates who are beyond practice ready—they are savvy, entrepreneurial, and critical practitioners ready to challenge the status quo; think outside the box; and reflect a strong sense of global issues such as climate change action, the Black Lives Matter movement, and structural violence. Health promotion courses must attend to responsive graduate capabilities for a rapidly changing practice environment which at its heart is social, political, critical, and emancipatory (Beric’-Stojšic’ et al., 2020). The third dialogue is about understanding local and global contexts. Local and global health promotion contexts are understood as more juxtaposed than superimposed. Nevertheless, graduates can only understand local implications by appreciating global environments. This new understanding ensures health promotion educators reevaluate how health promotion graduates acquire knowledge about, for example, social and humanitarian movements and apply global perspectives in real-world, local contexts (Auld & Bishop, 2015). The final dialogue is about appreciating global health promotion pedagogies. Health promotion pedagogies are geographically constrained and offer abundant opportunity for application and enhanced learnings across varied global social and cultural contexts. In particular, the sharing of innovative empirical learning and teaching approaches through a plethora of social media, discussion spaces, and open-access publications about transferrable approaches and rapidly evolving technologies will transcend boundaries and promote cross-pollination of pedagogical ideas (Warwick-Booth et al., 2018). The constant evaluation of health promotion pedagogies, responsive courses, and new-world graduate capabilities is prima facie to a competent health promotion workforce which can transcend global boundaries, enrich lives, and make the world a better place.
Pedagogy in Health Promotion invites submissions from all countries about learning and teaching in health promotion. Your manuscript should focus on innovative, theorised, and critical health promotion pedagogies evaluated against globally oriented graduate capabilities.
