Community Health: A Service Learning Capstone
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This document provides an overview of a community health capstone course at Ursinus College that incorporates service learning. The course aims to expose students to marginalized populations and health service providers through hands-on experience. It is designed to help students reflect on ethical issues in healthcare and challenges related to widespread health disparities. The course structure includes topics on community health, marginalized groups, and reflections on practice. Students complete service learning projects with local community partner organizations. Feedback from students was positive, though the COVID-19 pandemic required moving to online learning and changed some service projects.
Community Health: A Service Learning Capstone
- 1. Community Health: A Service Learning Capstone Catherine van de Ruit and Katie Turek 2020 Bonner Online Summer Leadership Institute: June 4-5, 2020
- 2. Overview • Course rationale and approach • Defining service learning in relation to community health • UCARE’s community partnerships • Student feedback/reflections on their experiences • Covid 19 and the shift to online learning
- 3. What is community health? The lack of an accepted definition of community can result in different collaborators forming contradictory or incompatible assumptions about community and can undermine our ability to evaluate the contribution of community collaborations to achieve public health objectives (MacQueen et al 2001)
- 4. Multiple actors • Fed eral age ncie s • Coll ege s • Stat e and mun icipa l age ncie s • Pati ents • NG Os (Goodman et al, 2014)
- 5. Course rationale • A capstone course for majors in Health and Exercise Physiology: – Health and allied health professions – Interest in public health • Unmet need for hands-on exposure to marginalized populations and health service providers • Reflect on the ethical dimensions of health care in the context of widespread disparity.
- 6. Course goals 1. Service learning strives for reciprocity: – Equal benefits for students and community partner; – Equal emphasis on service and learning; 2. Recognition of how social and physical environments shape health; 3. Challenge hierarchies existing in health: – Physician patient relations; – Top down policy design.
- 7. Course structure Topic Time frame Introduction to community health and service learning January – early Feb Marginalized populations Month of February SPRING BREAK Students begin work with their selected community organization March -April Ethics and community health April Reflection on practice Early May
- 8. Course principle • Social injustice as fundamental cause of ill health; • A lack of fairness or equity resulting from the structure of society or discrimination by individuals or groups.
- 9. Health consequences of social injustice • Infant mortality among African American’s 3 times higher than other race groups; • Women who are poor, low levels of education, and from a racial minority less likely to have access to family planning services; • Hispanic populations less likely to have health insurance (Levy 2019) • Minorities experiencing higher rates of hospitalization due to COVID 19
- 10. Structural violence “ Social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harms way. The Arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities)” (Farmer et al, 2004)
- 11. Support from UCARE • Katie visits two class sessions: – Intro to Service Learning and Community Partners – Identities, Positionality, Strengths-Based Approach to Service, Relationship Building, Self-Care
- 12. Examples of Partner Organizations
- 13. Student feedback • Different social injustices different groups of people go through on a daily basis, whether it's apparent or not. • It gave us an opportunity to go outside of the classroom and dive into a community and see real world problems rather than just learning about them in the classroom. • I really liked how we got to choose our own projects
- 14. The move to online learning This course is absolutely one of my favorite that I've taken at Ursinus. While COVID–19 drastically changed my service learning project, I was still introduced to a population I feel so passionate about helping. For anyone looking for a social justice forward course, this is definitely the one to take (2020 student feedback).