CSPH 5111: Cultural Ways of Thinking about Health
This course is taught completely online. Check the Schedule Builder for in-person meeting dates and times.
Ideas and approaches to health, healing, and wellbeing can differ significantly in today’s diverse, complex, and multi-cultural society. This course offers you the opportunity to experience different cultural communities beyond campus as they work to create health and reclaim vitality. In this class, you select from a menu of experiential, micro-immersion opportunities offered during the semester. The experiential dimension of this class asks you to select from optional field trips, volunteer opportunities, and other transformative learning experiences over the course of the semester. This experiential dimension builds your capacity to appreciate culturally different understandings of health and approaches to healing. Your experiential learning during the semester is supported by asynchronous readings and assignments as laid out in the Canvas site.
The course includes experiential glimpses designed to help you “gain a feel” for culturally different systems of knowledge and value outlooks. These experiences also give you a different standpoint from which to reflect back upon your own ideas of health through critical thinking and reflection. This work helps you to better recognize the culture you carry with you as you step into intercultural spaces. You will learn to better "see" what is often hidden in plain sight; what you have taken for granted as true; what you had not questioned. I ask you to challenge your own thinking and better recognize the culture you carry in your thinking as you experience culturally different systems of thought. This points to the critical self-reflection and cultural self-study work of the class. You will also apply this examination to the professional fields of your interest, sharing your insights with learners in other professions, bringing together interdisciplinary and intercultural learning.
Contact [email protected] for additional information.
- Fall