Health Sciences and Public Health Education

Admin leads: Nienke Van Houten and Kate Tairyan

The Health Sciences and Public Health Education research challenge area (RCA) aims to bring together FHS researchers, educators and their community partners for the advancement of health education scholarship, and to promote the core FHS value for excellence in teaching and learning. The RCA focuses on developing a “magnet” community that offers value, support, and guidance to the faculty, students and staff interested in enriching teaching, learning and curriculum development in FHS that is vision-driven and evidence-informed. We recognize that research can influence and inform teaching, teaching can influence and inform research, and that intentionally and scientifically investigating this cycle can impact both research quality and student experience; we are defining this concept as reflexivity. By combining teaching and research, we hope to create and enable a culture of reflexivity in T&L&R and a shared vision for scholarship around FHS pedagogies in various RCAs. We hope this will lead to identifying, assessing, and expanding high-impact signature pedagogies in FHS focusing on interdisciplinarity and experiential learning which will strengthen “our brand” as Canada’s most engaged university, will transform FHS T&L&R into a student-centered practice at and beyond the university, and will bring T&L scholarship from an individual-level endeavour to a faculty-wide approach that is embedded within our well-established research challenge areas.