A Tool for Educating Global Health Practitioners: the Curriculum Design Compass

Lisa Schmidt,Jane Scott,Amanda Wray,Jacqueline Miller,Kenneth Pope

doi:10.15694/mep.2017.000061

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. In health professions education there is a call for global health practitioners while in higher education there is a complementary call for internationalisation of the curriculum. However, implementation has not matched aspiration partly because of a lack of practical tools and illustrative examples. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach and presents the design and development of a practical tool: the curriculum design compass. The curriculum design compass covers four design spaces: What do students need to know about global health?; What do students need to be taught in order to develop cultural diversity awareness and intercultural competence?; How do we teach to facilitate and demonstrate intercultural learning?; and How do we bring students into contact with the wider world?The design compass was trialled with a Nutrition and Dietetics program and generalisability was confirmed with an unrelated profession. The programs studied were able to readily understand the tool and to use it to identify areas of existing good practice and areas for improvement. Therefore, it was both a review tool and a design tool enabling programs to manageably and holistically better prepare global health practitioners.

Highlights

The world and health professions have been calling for global health practitioners for reasons of social justice and personal professional fulfilment (McKimm & McLean, 2011)
While the conversation in the medical education literature has mainly revolved around training for global health (Brewer, Saba, & Clair, 2009), a parallel conversation in the higher education literature has been around Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) which focuses on situating the whole of the higher education experience in an international context
This paper presents a brief introduction to IoC and presents a tool and exemplars to help curriculum designers identify opportunities for IoC, and the education of global health practitioners

Summary

Introduction

The world and health professions have been calling for global health practitioners for reasons of social justice and personal professional fulfilment (McKimm & McLean, 2011). A more explicit presentation of the benefits of having cultural diversity in the Challenge groups may result in international or migrant students tending to conform less to Australian cultural norms and instead presenting and modelling international approaches This is leveraging cultural diversity in the classroom (a contribution to the SE quadrant), perhaps a small step towards transnational classes (SW quadrant), and may result in learning about other cultures (NW quadrant), Reviewing the learning outcomes of the topic, it is clear that the extent of internationalisation of the curriculum within the topic is not appropriately reflected and could be revised to explicitly acknowledge this aspect of the topic design. [1] ‘Topic’ here means one semester-long unit of study within the degree program

Findings

Discussion and Conclusions

Notes On Contributors