The Faculty of Health is pleased to showcase our innovative work in teaching and learning in this February issue of Innovatus. We are committed to advancing strategic initiatives and progressive teaching approaches in health and health-related programs that are critical in order for our future graduates to address complex health and health-care challenges and achieve success in building a healthier world.
Since the inception of the Faculty of Health, we have had a strong and clear vision. Now, as leaders and partners for a healthy and just 21st century world, our mission is to continue to positively influence health, wellness and their determinants through leading-edge education, research and practice. We are driven by five strategic directions highlighted in our current Strategic Plan for Building A Healthy World For All: advancing social justice; creating opportunities for student engagement and impact; amplifying research impact; partnering for positive change, and; seeing, hearing and supporting each other.
Chris Ardern
In this issue we are excited to showcase to the York community examples of our efforts regarding one of our strategic directions, creating opportunity for student engagement and impact. As a Faculty, we have a history of delivering education for the health professions and to students enrolled in health and health-related degree programs. Our experience with helping students to excel in meaningful education through community engagement is evident in the stories in this issue that focus on diverse experiential learning strategies and opportunities. This includes building relationships for intensive international practicum opportunities, sharing the lived experiences of both clinician and client, building spaces to create and share experiences using technology, and engaging with a wide range of students using active, classroom-based experiential approaches.
International experiences provide students from the health professions with a chance to situate learning in various cultural contexts. In this light, the School of Nursing has recently set the stage for a new nursing student practicum opportunity in Ghana. Partnering with Ghanian nurses and other interprofessional health-care providers, students will be able to complete a portion of a required, final, practice-focused course in a local hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. Faculty members at the School of Nursing played a key role in structuring this experience and have provided a template for building strong relationships with global partners.
In the Faculty's School of Kinesiology and Health Science, undergraduate students are able to study aspects of neurorehabilitation through an innovative experientially-focused course design where students have the opportunity to engage with health professionals and their clients. This experiential approach affords students time in the community with a neurorehabilitation clinician/researcher. Through interviewing and professional communication skills, students are able to explore what it means to be a clinician in this area of practice.
A new and innovative space that offers a state-of-the-art digital media facility in the Faculty of Health is in development - the "REEL Health Studio" (Reflective Experiential Education Lab) will showcase and enhance the diverse experiential learning opportunities that are available to our students. Faculty members can also leverage this great resource to create quality video content for experiential teaching.
While engaging health students in real-world settings is crucial to the success of our graduates, the Department of Psychology is also innovating in ways that engage both large and small groups of students in classroom-based experiential education (EE). In larger undergraduate classes, success is seen through the use of varied EE approaches, such as active learning, use of media and application-based class activities that augment students' connection of disciplinary content, while a graduate-level course that presents technology's role in healthy aging serves as an exemplar for how to leverage e-learning that provides important experiential opportunities to a smaller group of students.
The work that our students and graduates face in health care and health-related work settings mean that innovative approaches in teaching and learning are needed on a daily basis and are part of the fabric of our Faculty's programming. Our Faculty continues to engage with communities and with each other to strengthen experiential education. We invite colleagues and students across the University to read about our work and engage with us as we look to partner together to build on our collective efforts in support of a healthy and just world.
This story was originally featured in YFile, York University's community newsletter.
