Community Health Capstone Presenters: Van De Ruit and Turek

1. Community Health: A
Service Learning Capstone
Catherine van de Ruit and Katie Turek
2020 Bonner Online Summer
Leadership Institute: June 4-5, 2020

2. Overview
• Course rationale and approach
• Defining service learning in relation to
community health
• UCARE’s community partnerships
• Student feedback/reflections on their
experiences
• Covid 19 and the shift to online
learning

3. What is community health?
The lack of an accepted definition of
community can result in different
collaborators forming contradictory or
incompatible assumptions about
community and can undermine our
ability to evaluate the contribution of
community collaborations to achieve
public health objectives (MacQueen et al
2001)

4. Multiple actors
• Fed
eral
age
ncie
s
• Coll
ege
s
• Stat
e
and
mun
icipa
l
age
ncie
s
• Pati
ents
• NG
Os
(Goodman et al, 2014)

5. Course rationale
• A capstone course for majors in Health and
Exercise Physiology:
– Health and allied health professions
– Interest in public health
• Unmet need for hands-on exposure to
marginalized populations and health service
providers
• Reflect on the ethical dimensions of health
care in the context of widespread disparity.

6. Course goals
1. Service learning strives for reciprocity:
– Equal benefits for students and
community partner;
– Equal emphasis on service and learning;
2. Recognition of how social and physical
environments shape health;
3. Challenge hierarchies existing in health:
– Physician patient relations;
– Top down policy design.

7. Course structure
Topic Time frame
Introduction to community health and service learning January – early
Feb
Marginalized populations Month of
February
SPRING BREAK
Students begin work with their selected community
organization
March -April
Ethics and community health April
Reflection on practice Early May

8. Course principle
• Social injustice as fundamental cause
of ill health;
• A lack of fairness or equity resulting
from the structure of society or
discrimination by individuals or groups.

9. Health consequences of social
injustice
• Infant mortality among African American’s 3
times higher than other race groups;
• Women who are poor, low levels of
education, and from a racial minority less
likely to have access to family planning
services;
• Hispanic populations less likely to have
health insurance (Levy 2019)
• Minorities experiencing higher rates of
hospitalization due to COVID 19

10. Structural violence
“ Social arrangements that put individuals and
populations in harms way. The Arrangements
are structural because they are embedded in
the political and economic organization of our
social world; they are violent because they
cause injury to people (typically not those
responsible for perpetuating such inequalities)”
(Farmer et al, 2004)

11. Support from UCARE
• Katie visits two class
sessions:
– Intro to Service Learning
and Community Partners
– Identities, Positionality,
Strengths-Based
Approach to Service,
Relationship Building,
Self-Care

12. Examples of Partner Organizations

13. Student feedback
• Different social injustices different groups of
people go through on a daily basis, whether
it's apparent or not.
• It gave us an opportunity to go outside of the
classroom and dive into a community and
see real world problems rather than just
learning about them in the classroom.
• I really liked how we got to choose our own
projects

14. The move to online learning
This course is absolutely one of my
favorite that I've taken at Ursinus. While
COVID–19 drastically changed my
service learning project, I was still
introduced to a population I feel so
passionate about helping. For anyone
looking for a social justice forward
course, this is definitely the one to take
(2020 student feedback).