CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, AND PEDAGOGY article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1601195
This article is part of the Research TopicTransforming Academia for EquityView all 3 articles
Health Equity Requires Racial Equity: Learning the Impact of Historic Racism through a Summer Reading Assignment in a Graduate Public Health Course
Provisionally accepted
- College of Public Health, USF Health, Tampa, Florida, United States
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Prior to a fall semester graduate course in public health, students are encouraged to complete a summer reading assignment based on a book chosen from a curated list of popular literature relevant to public health concepts. From 2020-2024, this assignment enabled students to explore the history of structural and systemic racism in the United States and its impacts on current public health policy and programs. Themes from these books are woven into class discussions and further explored in subsequent course assignments. This paper describes the assignment and shares responses from the 1,141 students who completed the reading assignment as well as responses to subsequent assignments completed by the 1,464 students enrolled in the course. Scaffolding of complex and for some students challenging subjects facilitates a deeper understanding of factors critical to understanding contemporary public health challenges and helps students appreciate the significance of the social economic, and political determinants of health, including racism.
Keywords: pedagogy, Public Health, Graduate education, historic racism, health equity
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Petersen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Donna J Petersen, College of Public Health, USF Health, Tampa, 33612, Florida, United States
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