Students taking the Promoting Global Health course received an unexpected serving of video skills, thanks to a challenging and innovative course assignment delivered by their instructor.

By Elaine Smith

Students taking the York University course Promoting Global Health received an unexpected serving of video skills, thanks to a challenging course assignment.

The third-year course, required of all specialized honours majors in the Global Health Promotion and Disease Prevention stream in the Faculty of Health, is taught by Amrita Daftary, an assistant professor of global health. It focuses on health issues around the globe, exploring the determinants of these problems and considering equitable and community-focused ways to mitigate them. The students learn about various models and theories of health promotion and examine the current interventions and the triumphs and trials faced in addressing various problems.

“Students learn to think critically about what the problem is, what its causes are and the social circumstances that surround it,” Daftary said. “They need to consider the entire system, otherwise the solutions they create will be Band Aid solutions. They need to look toward something more sustainable.

“However, it’s about approach, not simply about the solution. Students need to build a sense of humility and collaboration. I offer a lecture about decolonizing global health so they can rid themselves of the saviour mentality and be mindful of the needs of the communities affected.”

Of course, a large part of health promotion is education, and that’s where videos – and PowerPoint presentations – entered the mix. Working in groups, students were required to create a case study of a marginalized group and one of its health problems, exploring three ways the problem was currently being addressed and pointing out what was working and what wasn’t. The analysis required them to use the theories and models learned in class.

Once they’d analyzed the problem and solutions, Daftary required each group to develop a set of recommendations for addressing the problem, including working with the community. They submitted a PowerPoint of these recommendations before tackling the challenge of creating individual videos.

“Video can be a useful way to deliver a message,” Daftary said. “The students had to choose a relevant stakeholder, such as someone experiencing the problem or someone at risk and create a three-minute succinct video with a clear message targeted to this audience. They had to consider which factors their stakeholder could control and present the message in language that stakeholder would understand. If they were focusing on teens, for example, a hip-hop message might be appropriate.”

Daftary brought in Bertland Imai from York’s Digital Media Support team to assist students with creating the videos, and Anda Petro, the faculty’s experiential education co-ordinator, to talk to the students about successful group work and how to capitalize on the strengths of each team member. The students had use of open access video tools and learned how to cut their video, juxtapose images, include text and add audio.

The students enjoyed the challenge of creating their own videos and learned skills that should be useful to them in health promotion careers.

“The creation of a stakeholder video takes a lot of cooperation from multiple creative minds,” said student Nicole Spiterie. “Each teammate contributed in their own style, making for an excellent vision and final product.

“Working with my colleagues made me realize the leadership skills I didn’t know I had.”

Classmate Alessia Scanga noted, “This assignment provided a great opportunity to collaborate with colleagues while serving as an effective means to integrate course concepts with real-world issues.”

Daftary was inspired “to see my students transform their understanding of important global health issues into a creative output.

“The students were very tech-savvy, which made this the perfect undergraduate assignment. They could feel proud of having an artistic, tangible output. We don’t often merge the creative and the scientific, but I found it gave the students a level of validation that they did not have with traditional written assignments.”

Undaunted by the pandemic, after reshaping her course to include role-playing exercises, an intrepid Faculty of Health professor took up the challenge offered by remote learning and took students into a virtual role-playing learning experience with stellar results.

By Elaine Smith

Lynda Van Dreumel spent hours reshaping her traditional Healthcare Leadership course into a blended course that included experiential education (EE) role-playing exercises – and then, the pandemic struck, requiring remote course delivery.

Van Dreumel, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health, decided that the fourth-year class would simply do the role-playing exercises online, and the plan worked beautifully. Students took to Zoom for synchronous role-playing scenarios for each of the course’s five modules. They simulated scenarios that included COVID-19 masking policies, drinking water on First Nations reserves and development of Ontario Health Teams.

“This was an opportunity to model the leadership attributes of resiliency, adaptability and creativity for my students,” said Van Dreumel.

“I was pleasantly surprised how well the online environment enables effective role playing. Students met the challenge by creatively constructing role play environments in their Zoom rooms. They found that sitting in their own safe environment made them more comfortable. They could also use different Zoom backgrounds that simulated an office or a clinic and use props to signal their characters.”

Although it is an elective, the leadership course is recommended for anyone doing a practicum, because it prepares students for management and leadership issues they will encounter on the job. They learn management theory and translate it into practice using the role-playing scenarios that allow them to try different approaches and reflect upon what worked and what didn’t.

“Students could make a meaningful connection between learning and their own personal development through reflection,” Van Dreumel said. “That’s a critical part of EE.

“Empathy, too, is such an important skill, and you need to be able to get into someone else’s shoes to see how they experience the world. Role playing gives the students regular real-time practice in empathy.”

The course consists of five modules and teams of students enact five related scenarios, then discuss their experiences during a debrief session. First, however, they do a self-evaluation to determine what type of leaders they are and where they need to improve their own emotional intelligence (EI). They use that assessment to inform the characters that they are given to play in each scenario and they all observe how their actions play out.

“There are opportunities to redo the scenario in case it doesn’t go well,” said Aija-Simone White, a fourth-year honours student in health studies. “You can run it again and try a different approach. It’s a safe space to explore different approaches. You can think about what would happen if Charlie did X and play the scenario that way; you can see how the concepts play out.

“Role playing makes you realize the complexities of a role and the different dynamics of each team. It has me thinking all the time; it has my mind going.”

Priyansh Thapa, a graduating health studies graduate from India, took the course online last year and is grateful for the insights he gained.

“The emotional intelligence assessment allowed me to reflect on the things I needed to work on,” he said, “and getting the chance to play roles made me really feel like a clinic manager or a cleaner in a hospital. It’s important to understand how others feel when you work on a team; you need to understand the other roles, too.”

Van Dreumel sees a real benefit to role playing enacted online and is considering conducting some of the scenarios remotely when students are back on campus.

“It’s a trade-off,” she said. “The level of discussion and engagement is higher in person, but you can’t suspend disbelief, the way you can do with remote role playing.

“Overall, we were able to weave a meaningful role-play experience where students could engage in role play as an EE activity from the comfort of their own home.”

In her third-year course on statistics, a Faculty of Health psychology professor and her teaching assistant help students overcome their fear about statistics by empowering them to understand the power and potential of data.

By Elaine Smith

Monique Herbert is determined to help psychology students to overcome their fear of statistics and embrace quantitative reasoning.

“A lot of my students’ fear about statistics is because they tie it to the idea that it’s math and math is difficult,” said Herbert, an associate professor of psychology in the teaching stream. “When you help them understand the purpose of statistics and connect their use to real-world problems or psychological data, they begin to lose their fear and understand.”

In her third-year course, Intermediate Statistics I, students enter the class already knowing some statistical basics, so she takes them further into the realm of data, teaching them to work with the types of data they might use while doing their own research or read about in research publications written by others. “As students progress through the course, they comment on how it has helped them to read articles more carefully and gain an appreciation for being able to critically appraise the work of others,” Herbert said. “It’s empowering for them.”

Throughout the course, students have many opportunities (mini activities, a group project, and a data analysis and reporting assignment) to explore a problem using data and must learn the statistical software R – an innovative programming language, which helps to lay out the process for analyzing those data. These tasks foster critical thinking, Herbert says, because if they do not understand the process, they will not achieve the desired output. Students are provided with customized R tutorials prepared by Course Teaching Assistant (TA) Mark Adkins, a psychology PhD student in the Quantitative Methods program, to help students use and apply R (see example).

One of the course projects for which students can apply and display their R skills is an exercise in data visualization, which is done in groups of two or three.

“People may not always understand the results from data analysis when presented just as a listing of means and standard deviations, for example,” Herbert said. “In these cases, we need to present our statistical information with pictures to get the message across. We talk about audience quite a bit; if it takes the reader an inordinate amount of time to figure out the visual, it’s not working.”

The student teams can choose any data set they like for this project. Herbert and her TA are on hand to guide them as they proceed.

“We tell them to take the product to their family or friends to see if they understand it,” she said.

The other purpose of the data visualization project is to have students work in teams.

“There isn’t a lot of opportunity in statistics courses to work in groups and achieve a common goal,” Herbert said. “We have a lot of conversations about what makes a great team and how to play to your strengths. Group work is helpful, because peers can assist you, although each student in the group must be able to replicate the code themselves.”

They are required to keep a reflective learning journal about their class experiences, documenting their observations about working alone and being part of a team – all, as Herbert notes – “healthy reflection.”

Given that many of these students go on to do a thesis in psychology or another field, Herbert is confident that they will leave with tools that allow them to communicate easily with other researchers.

“If students leave this course, walk into a lab and are given a data set to work with, they will know how to proceed,” Herbert said. “If not, these skills come in handy in critically appraising and translating information. They are skills that benefit the students academically and for life.”