Today’s episode of the Making Public Health Personal Podcast looks at an oral history project at CUNY SPH called Public Health Education Now. This project asks students, faculty and staff at CUNY SPH how their lived experiences since 2020 have shaped their vision of what we want public education to be.
Host Laura Meoli-Ferrigon speaks with three members of the Public Health Education Now team about how they use the lessons they’ve learned from this project in their anti-racist classrooms today. We’ll discuss the oral history interviews that the team conducted, focusing on experiences of not only the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the increased visibility of racism and other oppressions, and movements for racial justice that are reverberating both in and out of the classroom. While working on this project, the team learned how to overcome major breakdowns in communication by using a method called restorative circles, and used the power of pause to get back on track. Learn how to create meaningful group assignments that allow for reflection and reinforce learning. One of these suggestions is actually to make public health personal! We discuss this and other important pedagogy tips which can promote a culture of acceptance, healing and respectful collaboration in the classroom and beyond.
The Public Health Education Now project was co-lead by two CUNY SPH Associate Professors from the CUNY SPH department of Community Health and Social Sciences: Dr. Emma Tsui and Dr. Spring Cooper. Dr Emma Tsui’s work focuses on intersections of community health, occupational health and social sciences. Her research methods include some innovative methods such as peer interviewing, digital storytelling, and oral history, which is the format used for this particular project. Dr. Spring Cooper is a social researcher with experience in public health, health promotion and sexuality. Her academic background focuses on BioBehavioral health and prevention, as well as sexual health education and knowledge among young people. Ayah Elsayed helped to design this project, conducted interviews and worked to build and maintain the audio archive for the Public Health Education Now project. She graduated in 2022 from CUNY SPH with her MPH, and now teaches public health at Pace University.
Episode Links:
Anti-racist teaching collaborative: https://chass.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Find out more and connect with Ayah Elsayed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayah-elsayed-mph-a93697150/
Download a transcript of this episode here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/roeex1mgnysena3/Episode%2012%20transcript.docx?dl=0
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