University of Washington public health undergraduates don’t have to wait to put their training into practice.
During the school year, they educate King County residents on how to save lives during cardiac arrest. They interview communities about their mental health experiences for a local museum’s oral history archive. They assess gaps in accessibility for students and recommend improvements.
And they do all this near the beginning of their major’s intensive training, after being accepted into a competitive application process at the UW School of Public Health.
Students in the public health-global health (PH-GH) major are immersed in their required experiential learning course toward the beginning of the program, which is a new change to the curriculum. While hands-on learning opportunities in college often come as cumulative capstone experiences at the end of a students’ training, leaders of the public health-global health major saw an opportunity to introduce students early to the communities they will learn from and serve.
“I want to create public health practitioners that have a deeper sense of their humanity and a deeper sense of justice,” said Anjulie Ganti, director of experiential learning for the public health-global health major and teaching professor of health systems and population health.
Ganti said that having these valuable experiences early allows students to be competitive for public health internships and jobs the summer after their first year in the program because they can show they’ve led public health work alongside communities. The redesigned curriculum also provides professional development for students to build resumes and portfolios demonstrating their public health experience.
“We prepare them to understand what they need to know to do public health work,” Ganti said. “My approach is helping them to take a critical eye in who they are and how they want to participate in the health and wellbeing of others, in a way that is right with their integrity and values.”
Ganti has seen tremendous growth in students' abilities through the experiential learning course. Students who were afraid to speak up in class confidently interviewed strangers, gave presentations to local health boards, or led video production on CPR training.
“They do things they never thought they could do.” Ganti said.
To ensure that both students and community partners benefit from these projects, the course is structured with in-classroom didactic training about trustworthiness, self-reflection, as well as technical skills.
“We instructors bring our own relationships with communities to the course, which requires deep relationship building on many different fronts,” said Kate West, assistant teaching professor of Health Systems and Population Health. “We must prepare them to be good stewards of our relationships-- part of what the course lecture covers.”
These strong partnerships with communities across the state are key to supporting the public health workforce for years to come.
"Core to our workforce training is hands-on, experiential learning made possible by our partners in communities, government and industry,” said UW SPH Dean Hilary Godwin. “We are so grateful for this collaboration, as together we expand the impact of partner organizations while preparing students for jobs that make our communities healthier, safer and more prosperous."
At the end of the experiential learning course, Ganti asks students to reflect on their “aha moments”, or things they learned from working with communities. Students shared how the soft skills they developed, like building trust and connection, were just as important as the technical skills. They learned that public health is everything: an after-school program, a homeless shelter, and public transportation, because these things can all be benefits or barriers to living a healthy life.
At a public university, Ganti said better preparing students for public health careers through experiential learning is in service to the public. Because the University of Washington is funded in part by taxpayer dollars, the public is investing trust that the education system will help Washingtonians thrive.
“We have a public university system because we believe an educated public makes a healthy public,” Ganti said. “Students are investing in the public’s trust to take care of them.”
Healthier Washingtonian hearts
Education around how to help people who are experiencing cardiac arrest saves lives, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Washington state. Between 2016-2020, 18.9% of people who had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in King County survived. The national average of survival is only 10%, according to the American Red Cross. King County’s advantage in this area is in part thanks to how many people – from EMS to paramedics to the community – have been trained to notice the signs of cardiac arrest and respond.
That’s something PH-GH undergraduate Olivia Yoon learned during her experiential learning project with King County Emergency Medical Services, and their Vulnerable Populations Strategic Initiative (VPSI). This initiative creates educational materials to train community members in King County to notice the signs of a cardiac arrest and respond by calling 911, performing CPR, and using an automated external defibrillator (AED) to deliver a shock that restores a person’s heartbeat.
“It was cool to see how much of an impact education has in saving people's lives,” Yoon said. “Spreading information leaves people better equipped to deal with those situations.”
For the project, Yoon and her classmates continued this lifesaving education. They were tasked with creating a video to help people recognize the signs of cardiac arrest, perform CPR, and properly apply and use an AED. They also created posters that are displayed in UW’s Intramural Activities Building with QR codes that link to the video and other lifesaving resources around heart health.
As part of the video creation, students did pilot testing with emergency management user groups in King County who provided constructive feedback that the students incorporated into their final product.
Yoon said the learning experience helped her to see how public health work existed in places she didn’t expect.
“This broadened my understanding of what public health roles and interventions actually look like, what preventative work can look like beyond a biomedical perspective,” Yoon said. “It was interesting to see how organizations like VPSI have been so effective at interacting with communities and creating targeted messaging.”
The power of community storytelling in public health
Collecting oral histories may not sound like public health work, but as public health students learned, these histories are critical to understanding communities’ firsthand experiences navigating everything from pandemics to immigration.
One student group worked with the Somali Health Board – a grassroots organization that promotes health equity for King County Somali communities – to collect and share the oral histories of Seattle-area Somali community members during the COVID-19 pandemic. A previous class of students worked with the Somali Health Board to collect the interviews, so the oral histories project has been a collective effort from different cohorts of undergraduates.
In this most recent year, students took the transcripts from interviews with the Somali King County community and wrote summaries, which they then visually presented on digital platforms, in a booklet, and on a poster. The interviews shared the challenges of supporting their child’s online education during the pandemic, the grief of losing beloved elders in their communities, and their resiliency in supporting each other, such as by delivering groceries to seniors. These interviews will be kept both by the Somali Health Board and the Washington State Historical Society, as part of its goal to preserve Washington’s history.
“A lot of transcripts I read showed evidence that there is a lot of trust and care and connection that has been built in the Somali community toward Somali individuals who are in public health,” said Suler Lu, an undergraduate who participated in the project. “People in their lives, like faith leaders and public health professionals within their community, could connect pieces of their culture to health during a time like COVID-19. That was a different take on knowledge dissemination for me. It could be on a much more personal level and related to culture.”
Another set of students collected oral histories from senior South Asian immigrants living in the Pacific Northwest. These oral histories shared insights into what influences their health and wellbeing, which can inform organizational program offerings for seniors and improve how cultural practices are incorporated into health care.
For this project, students worked with the Indian American Community Services, an organization that supports the south Asian community in the Pacific Northwest, and the Wing Luke Museum, which will archive the oral histories. 35 students paired up to interview 17 seniors who had immigrated to the U.S. when they were younger. During Zoom interviews, students asked questions to learn why they migrated, where they lived, and what their health care practices looked like.
Students then analyzed the transcripts to identify common themes across interviews. They learned that this group of seniors valued traditional and holistic medicine to manage chronic illnesses, that they recognized the importance of self-advocacy in the U.S. health care system, and how they valued community centers to reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation.
For undergraduate Bhavya Nandikanti, this experiential learning project helped her understand how important qualitative stories are in public health research. While epidemiologic data can give a broad picture of a community’s health, stories are critical to contextualizing those numbers. For example, data reveals how South Asian immigrant communities struggle with health conditions like diabetes, while stories from oral histories about how culture influences diet can help community organizations create culturally relevant diet plans for South Asian people managing their diabetes.
“With this project, we could get the story behind the numbers,” Nandikanti said.
Advocating for accessibility
One of the first assignments Aleia Hofschneider Santos did for her experiential learning course was navigate campus using routes accessible by a motorized chair. Santos and her classmates, who had never used a motorized chair before, quickly learned that it takes more than a ramp to create accessible buildings and classrooms. Sometimes the available paths were significantly longer or were disrupted by construction. Occasionally, buttons to open building doors were broken.
“It was a great way to acknowledge our privilege and examine experiences outside of ourselves,” Santos said.
Santos’ experiential learning course was focused on disability as part of the UW Disability Advocacy Project. Alongside student-run groups like the Disability and Deaf Cultural Center (D-Center) and ASUW Disability Student Commission, the project examined disability and accessibility at UW to understand how resources could be improved.
The project spans multiple cohorts of undergraduate classes, and includes surveys of staff, faculty, and students to learn what opportunities and barriers existed when it came to connecting students with disability resources.
Santos and her peers were tasked with analyzing 20 staff and advisor surveys for common themes. They found that respondents wanted to support students but sometimes didn’t understand how due to their own limited experiences around disability. Meanwhile, staff members who did have disabilities said they relied on their own experiences to help students.
In the final report the students developed for the project, they recommended that formal training for all faculty and staff around support for students with disabilities could be valuable for helping UW community members improve physical and digital spaces. They suggested that this type of formal training could be similar to anti-hazing or Title IX training that staff across UW take.
“Most of the time, people aren’t actively trying to deny students an accommodation, but there are people who are unaware of these things because of how they are socialized and ableism,” Santos said.
Santos said that her experience growing up with her dad, who is a war veteran with a disability that isn’t physically obvious, helped her understand the challenges of access to resources and health care. She and her family moved to the Pacific Northwest from Tinian Island in Micronesia to better access health care.
“It’s all around us but we are conditioned to think of disability as a separate thing: there are reserved parking spaces at the front of the lot, there’s a button to open the door, there’s a ramp next to the stairs — problem solved,” Santos said. “Those are steps in right direction, but there are more concrete and less physical things people don't think about.”
Santos’ experience seeing the challenges her dad faced in accessing health care inspired her to major in public health, with a pre-med focus. She said the support of the public health major, including instructors who know her by name and diverse faculty who bring their unique expertise to class, are helping her with this goal.
“The public health major opened my eyes to all the work that can be done and communities that can be helped, especially underserved communities,” Santos said.