Health and Human Performance Team

Elizabeth Bailey

Lecturer, HHP Department

Angela Owusu-Ansah

Associate Dean and Associate Professor, School of  Education

Amanda Tapler, MPH

Senior Lecturer, HHP Department 

Overview

The department of Health and Human Performance has as a primary focus the promotion of health and wellness.  As our Diversity Infusion Project we offered a new 200 level experimental GST course (4s.h.) titled “Perspectives in Personal and Global Health” in WT 2013, taught by Dr. Jeffrey Milroy, and then again in Spring 2013 taught by Prof. Amanda Tapler. Our goal in developing this course was to intentionally create a course that provided students the opportunity to examine the principle dimensions of health and personal lifestyle choice through the lens of diversity.  Culture and diversity are essential factors that impact stress, nutrition, chronic disease, and physical activity. Given that students represent a medley of diverse backgrounds and life experiences that, if shared, could enhance the perceptions of their classmates, we intended to tap this potential to build both understanding and appreciation of diversity in the classroom. We believed that by exploring how health varies among different religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups,  each student would be able to better define the importance of health in his/her own life, potentially influencing both behaviors and attitudes.

In order to effectively infuse diversity into the curriculum of this course, we first worked with a team of students from diverse backgrounds to identify health topics of interest to them. Once the list was refined, we created specific modules for use that expanded the content available on the topic in order to offer a wider perspective, and developed accompanying activities/strategies to be used to enhance student dialogue and tap into the diverse backgrounds brought by students to the course.  In so doing, our goal was to challenge students to think globally as they considered the health issues and disparities they encountered over the course, and to acquire skills to address these issues effectively through dialogue in class and in reflective writing across the course.

As the number of faculty teaching this course grows, it is our hope that additional modules and activities will be generated and shared.

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