Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in Health Promotion

How Can We Ensure That Teaching Remains Relevant in the Information Technology Revolution?

Some colleagues have suggested that classroom teaching is losing its relevance in the age of the Internet and social media (in their many forms). This is a valid concern, but the answer is not simple. Access to information is far greater than it was in the past, as is information overload. Learners, and many of those in professional education programs, are impatient and want “fast learning” to go with their fast food. They would rather read an abstract or a set of PowerPoint slides than absorb an entire text, article, or research report. In-depth learning of methods for research, and teaching, requires more than the Cliff’s notes.

We are therefore challenged to make our teaching methods as appealing as all the information flow that we compete with. And we need to be able to target and emphasize the necessary learning tools. (Yes, such as reading the entire article, including the Methods section!) To take wisdom from Dorothy Nyswander’s classic statement, we also need to “start where the people [students] are” (Nyswander, 1956). We need to diversify our teaching to include online methods, along with classroom experiences, fieldwork, and hybrid approaches.

What Strategies to Link Health Behavior/Promotion Research to Teaching Show Promise?

While writing about improving health through community engagement and community building, Nina Wallerstein and colleagues recently pointed out that “the principle of integrating knowledge and action is aimed at balancing evidence-based knowledge with practice- and community-based knowledge in a bidirectional process that creates action to produce community benefit” (Wallerstein, Minkler, Carter-Edwards, Avila, & Sanchez, 2015, p. 285). Teaching and learning strategies that are integrated and bidirectional come in many forms. They include classroom discussions, mentoring, inquiry learning that challenges learners to stretch themselves to participate, and discovery learning where learners are assigned to learn while finding solutions to specific problems. These strategies can be carried out online, in lecture/laboratory sessions, and in team-based and individual assignments.

Action learning will never become passé. My team’s experience over the past decade, with what began as a measurement research project, illustrates this. We worked to develop a set of valid and reliable measures of consumer food environments—what shoppers and diners encounter in stores and restaurants (Glanz, Sallis, Saelens, & Frank, 2005)—to advance our research on multilevel influences on the association between nutrition environments, food intake, and health. We first developed the NEMS (Nutrition Environment Measures Survey) tools (Glanz, Sallis, Saelens, & Frank, 2007; Saelens, Glanz, Sallis, & Frank, 2007) at about the time that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called on states to evaluate their health-promoting community environments. Within a few years, we packaged the tools and related documentation and offered multi-day training workshops for practitioners, researchers, and teaching faculty (Honeycutt, Davis, Clawson, & Glanz, 2010). Train-the-trainer programs followed, as did an online training program (http://www.med.upenn.edu/nems/onlinetraining.shtml), which has been used by more than 2,300 learners. We were surprised to learn that NEMS was also adopted by many instructors who taught Community Nutrition courses, because of its easy usability as a practical learning tool. In short, our research project had a new life as a learning activity. Other research-to-teaching examples have travelled along this path, most often facilitated by information technology in ways that were not possible in the past.

What Ideas to Create Structural Change in Health Promotion/Behavior Teaching Are Worth Pursuing?

There are a few ideas worth considering to create structural changes that can encourage excellence in health promotion teaching and learning, and that should also stimulate scholarship to build evidence about the process and effects of these strategies. The first is to create the role of master teacher(s)—a designation for outstanding teachers who can serve as role models, mentors, and leaders in health promotion pedagogy. This designation could be within universities or across universities, or sponsored by professional organizations such as the Society for Public Health Education.

A second idea involves creating and supporting opportunities and roles for translational teaching. The “translational teachers” would be scholars who exemplify strategies for creating bridges between and among theory, research, practice, and teaching. An ideal outcome from this type of role would be dissemination and scale-up of model translational initiatives, including those showcased in this journal.

A third idea that might have contemporary resonance is that of teaching boot camps. Such immersive experiential programs expose learners (who are teachers) to novel teaching approaches while they build teams. It is easy to imagine that these boot camps might not only help build a strong cadre of teachers, but they can also generate creative strategies to take back to classrooms of all kinds.

Summary

These are a few thoughts that summarize my views on the scholarship of teaching and learning. We can remain relevant by respecting long-standing sources of information while diversifying with new technology. We should embrace and try a broad array of teaching strategies, especially those that are bidirectional, interactive, and support action learning. And we can initiate and support structural changes to model high-quality teaching, disseminate evidence on pedagogy, and build teams.

How can we keep moving toward excellence in health promotion pedagogy and growing the field? This journal can serve as a guide, to keep in your backpack and refer to along with the GPS that will guide you as you hike up hills and across bridges—all while keeping the destination of health improvement in sight.