Celebrating 10 Years of Pedagogy in Health Promotion : Promising Methods and Practices

Introduction

With the timing of this editorial at the start of the academic year, we want to highlight scholarship published in Pedagogy in Health Promotion offering promising methods and practices we, as educators, can use in courses. As the journal’s focus is on the scholarship of teaching and learning in health promotion and public health, we have curated key practices and applied examples of ways to implement pedagogical techniques from articles since 2020 with the goal of providing concrete, practical guidance for educators seeking innovative practices. We reviewed articles in recent volumes and special issues, including those most cited and most read, to identify promising pedagogical practices in five areas: (a) Active learning and critical reflection methods; (b) holistic, student-centered pedagogical activities; (c) mentoring and implementing anti-oppression oriented, anti-racist, or equity-focused teaching approaches in class assignments; (d) resources to teach and address the rise and use of mis/disinformation; and (e) inclusion and evaluation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a new tool in public health pedagogy. In each of the five pedagogical areas, we summarize several activities that offer promising approaches for teaching complex public health content.

Active Learning and Critical Reflection Methods

Active learning methods, in which students can apply concepts to real-world situations, are an important tool for health promotion and public health pedagogy. For example, Nelson et al. (2018) show how problem-based learning (PBL) can promote student engagement in a global health course. Problem-based learning facilitates self-directed learning through case studies, simulations, and roleplaying activities that mirror real-world situations (Savery, 2006). Nelson et al. (2018) offer simulation and role play-based assignments, including an exercise in which students experience the effort needed to carry fresh water in areas of scarcity, and model-United Nations (UN) activities where students practice representing a UN member state. Ezezika and Gong (2021) describe a competitive, entrepreneurial pitch exercise in which students develop solutions to global-health issues and present them to an external expert panel. Both sets of activities facilitate understanding of global health issues through exploration of complex stakeholder interactions and geopolitical influences on health. Fifolt et al. (2023) offer an interprofessional tabletop simulation activity in which healthcare administration and public health students respond to a tornado emergency/disaster scenario.

Critical reflection allows students to evaluate their experiences, understandings, and assumptions related to public health and health promotion topics, representing a key aspect of transformational learning (Taylor, 2008). Lightfoot et al. (2021) offer a Critical Race Theory-informed photography assignment where students reflect and depict themselves as future health professionals to explore interactions between their racial and professional identities. Adamson et al. (2023) provide a scaffolded autoethnographic assignment where students apply behavior-change theories to their own actions. The authors note that centering students’ experiences allows them to connect “their personal experience to larger sociocultural patterns, and by reflecting on their own biases and assumptions while considering alternative perspectives” (Adamson et al., 2023, p. 258).

Holistic, Student-Centered Pedagogical Activities

Amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is widely recognized that maintaining robust health promotion and public health systems requires better acknowledging and addressing trainees’ mental and physical health needs. Several articles provide evidence-based practices to promote wellness within the classroom, including techniques for incorporating mindfulness into lessons and reshaping curricula to enrich students’ experiences to reduce unnecessary stress. Vilvens et al. (2012) highlight the importance of fostering student mindfulness as a positive mental-health habit and a trauma-informed learning approach, especially in personal health-focused courses. They offer concrete examples of mindfulness-focused assignments, including: using an app to assist with at-home meditation and deep breathing, in-class guided meditation with one-word reaction/response, and an in-class, five-senses-grounding activity with a written reflection.

In addition to in-class activities, broader curricular changes, including grading alterations and flexible deadlines, represent opportunities to support equitable, student-centered practices and facilitate authentic learning experiences (Kalbarczyk et al., 2023; Merzel, 2023). Specifications” grading (Gay et al., 2023; Nilson & Stanny, 2015) and “ungrading” (Ferguson, 2013; Kalbarczyk et al, 2023) represent two such approaches. Kalbarczyk et al. (2023) detail implementing ungrading in two graduate courses and conclude that ungrading may facilitate increased student engagement, promote a focus on learning and content rather than “earning points,” and provide needed flexibility for graduate students. Gay et al. (2023) report similar positive outcomes following implementation of specifications grading, or “competency-based grading,” in graduate public health courses. The authors discuss using incentives to acknowledge students’ mastery of content and provide comparisons between specification-based grading and traditionally graded assessments. Kruger et al. (2023) suggest we reconsider the need for late-assignment penalties and advocate for flexible deadlines, instead, to better allow students to meet work, family, and other requirements without impacting their grades.

Supporting Anti-Oppression Oriented and Anti-Racist or Equity-Focused Teaching Approaches

Merzel’s (2022) “Pedagogy to guide the next 70 years of SOPHE and 150 years of American public health” calls for increasing the diversity of the public health workforce and communities served, with mentorship as essential in achieving these goals. Several articles offer steps to mentor students as learners in the classroom and also as emergent public health professionals. Zamora et al.’s (2024) “Sounding the Alarm on Public Health Education” offers examples of Equity-Focused Teaching (EFT) approaches that create transparency about the purpose of an assignment, its specific tasks or components, and its scoring or evaluation with detailed advice about best practices for assignment completion. EFT can engage students of color and first-generation students and those who may have less public health experience. Adding these criteria helps level the understanding of an assignment and its successful completion for all learners. This EFT approach supports the University of Washington’s School of Public Health’s curriculum competency “requiring all SPH students to acknowledge the impact of racism and persuade the institution to develop resources to support education around racism” which can be adapted for use by others (Zamora et al., 2024, p. 2).

As the current health promotion and public health workforce does not reflect the diversity of communities it intends to serve, minoritized students will need intentional preparation to face unique challenges in the workforce, such as microaggressions (Garcia et al., 2023; Thorpe et al., 2021). Formal training pathways provide guidance for professional identity-development activities that allow students to learn while recognizing their own intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 1989) and the identities of those they will serve. Several recent articles provide detailed mentorship models. The Mentoring of Students and Igniting Community (MOSAIC) model (Samari et al., 2022): “outlines institutional practices and processes for first-generation and students of color that could change the institutional structure by emphasizing anti-racism for potential replication at other schools of public health” (p. 269). MOSAIC offers interrelated domains for faculty, curriculum, and institutional structure. It describes approaches for mentoring a diverse body of students as future public health leaders through professional development, faculty mentorship, and navigation of institutional and academic support. MOSAIC includes ways to engage community leaders and to address incident management. Garcia et al. (2023) describe the Sanos y Fuertes Graduate Research Fellowship. The program facilitates research training, professional development, and mentorship, focusing on Latinx students. The authors offer specific topics for student training and detailed evaluation methods.

An entire supplemental issue of Pedagogy in Health Promotion reports on the CDC’s program to increase public health workforce diversity through public health training of underrepresented students (Thorpe et al., 2021). The Summer Public Health Scholars Program (SPHSP), prepares college juniors, seniors, or recent graduates for graduate education and careers in public health. The training program offers graduate-level coursework, writing training, professional development, Graduate Record Exam (GRE) preparation, and field experiences in diverse, economically disadvantaged environments (Joyner, 2021). SPHSP also offers examples of teaching methods for modeling, coaching, and scaffolding activities.

Resources to Teach and Address Rise and Use of Mis/Disinformation

The field of public health faces increased availability and access to mis- and disinformation (Smith Romocki et al., 2024). Work by Early et al. (2024) provides examples of effective approaches to teaching about these concepts. They distinguish misinformation as “characterized by falsehoods that might be spread unintentionally without malintent, while disinformation is misleading or erroneous information that is spread to purposefully cause harm” (p. 2). Early et al. (2024) offer several ways to teach about mis/disinformation, such as exercises where students use fact checkers to build information assessment skills. Also outlined are ways to strengthen media literacy by teaching source triangulation and use of technology tools (e.g., Google photo search and AI options). Techniques such as SIFT or “(1) stop, (2) investigate the source, (3) find better coverage, and (4) trace claims, quotes, and media to the original source and context” (p. 5) can teach about mis/disinformation via the use of gamification (e.g., online scavenger hunts or escape rooms). Early et al.’s (2024) Table 2, “Resources for Teaching and Learning About Mis/Disinformation,” offers many ways to approach mis/disinformation issues with different types of learners.

Inclusion and Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a New Tool in Public Health Pedagogy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a heavily debated topic of discussion amongst educators, whether regarding how to detect machine-created content in student work or ways to harness AI in course preparation and assignments. Conrad and Hall (2024) focus on Generative AI (GAI)’s ethics, benefits, and ongoing challenges. They define GAI as “a subset of artificial intelligence that employs models trained on existing datasets to generate novel data including text, image, and audio. GAI tools, such as ChatGPT, ClaudeAI, Bing Chat, and Google Bard, are large language models (LLMs) that leverage machine-learning algorithms to generate and synthesize a broad spectrum of information” (p. 1). In their Table 1, Conrad and Hall (2024) share promising practices using Chat GPT prompts to create an introduction to a health disparities course. Their article offers ways to use GAI as a curriculum-building tool that generates course outlines, activities, and scenarios/cases; creates assessments such as rubrics, and includes broader DEI and decolonializing approaches. GAI, they suggest, can create more interactive and relevant learning tools for students.

Guidelines for GAI use by students are also helpful to educators embracing this technology. Based upon a survey of 62 public health instructors, August et al., (2024) created a framework offering instructors step-by-step guidelines to describe the ways students can or cannot use AI in their individual course assignments. This framework can help instructors clearly define their demarcations for AI use. The creation of course-based and assignment-based AI guidelines is vital as students report regularly using AI, and both students and instructors express apprehension about the clarity of policies for its use in courses (Anderson et al., 2024).

Conclusion

Entering a new academic year provides a valuable opportunity to assess and adapt current practices to include promising teaching and course-design approaches. Here, we aimed to provide an accessible guide summarizing encouraging pedagogical practices in a number of important areas. For each of the topics addressed, we recommend a curated set of articles from Pedagogy in Health Promotion, which provide practical tools or exercises for instructors. In reviewing these articles and practices, we, too, have bookmarked those we will explore in our own teaching in the coming year. We hope this editorial piques readers’ interests in further adapting or developing similar impactful and innovative techniques which benefit students and our profession.