Shaping the Future of Public Health Education: Innovations and Strategies

On this episode of FYI we dive into the latest research and the vision for the future of public health education.

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In this Episode

Laura Magaña, President and CEO of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) and Lisa Sullivan, Associate Dean for Education and a Professor of Biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health, join FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the seismic shifts occurring within higher education and public health. They also dig into the transformative power of higher education and the essential development of a new social contract centered on inclusive excellence. Lisa goes over three reports dealing with public health and education detailing vital recommendations for cultivating environments where every student thrives. 

Laura and Lisa, with their extensive expertise, underscore the urgency of adaptability, community collaboration, and collective action in education. Join us for a conversation that will inspire you, and incite action towards a healthier future for us all.

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Episode Transcript

Shaping the Future of Public Health Education with Laura Magaña and Lisa Sullivan

Publishing Date: April 30, 2024

[00:00:06] Intro: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. Today, we’ll listen to a conversation that I’ve recently had with Laura Magaña and Lisa Sullivan from ASPPH. They’ll be discussing Framing the Future: Education for Public Health 2030.

In an era of unprecedented public health challenges, ASPPH stands at the forefront of educational innovation with its Framing the Future 2030 initiative. Launched to contemplate the evolving landscape of education for public health, FTF 2030 is a visionary project aimed at preparing future global health professionals for a world of complex health challenges. Let’s listen in to the conversation.

Laura, Lisa, great to see you.

[00:00:52] Laura: Great to see you, Gil.

[00:00:53] Lisa: Good to be here.

[00:00:54] Gil: Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you, both, for spending the time. I know you’re very busy with the new launch, which we’ll get to here in a moment, but for the benefit of our listeners, I would love for you to both to, kind of, just give us a brief introduction — who you are, where you’re from, how you got there, what inspires you, all those sorts of fun things.

So, Laura, let’s start with you.

[00:01:12] Laura: So, I am from Mexico. Actually, I’m a Mexican, American citizens right now, both countries. And my background is in education. I’m really thrilled to be doing this because all of my experience is in education. I have been at the association. I am the president and CEO of ASPPH, which I will describe what ASPPH stands for, for the last seven years. But before that, I was the Dean of the School of Public Health, actually, in Mexico for 14 years. And all my life, I have been just working before that in higher education, which again, education is my passion.

So, as the president of the association, three years ago, we started to think about, what’s the education for the 2030, you know, in the future? And what are the things that we need to be thinking about? So, ASPPH is the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. We encompasses 150 members all around the country and in five other countries.

Together, we are training more than 90,000 students that are in our institutions. And we really represent more than 13,000 faculty. So, we are a very powerful group. We are the voice of academic public health. And as such, that’s why we started to launch the Framing the Future 2030. So, I’ll stop there, and I’ll pass it to Lisa.

[00:02:27] Lisa: Thank you. My name is Lisa Sullivan. I am the Associate Dean for Education and a professor of biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. I’ve been here about 28 years, and I have the great privilege to teach in our programs. That’s really my passion. I love teaching. I love working with students.

I was involved in our developing a minor program to introduce undergraduates to public health here at Boston University. And I currently oversee all of our educational programs at our School of Public Health, which is a graduate school. So, we have an MPH and master’s of science, and PhD and a DrPH degree. And we recently launched a new online MPH, which I’m really enjoying teaching in right now, to reach students that couldn’t otherwise come to Boston.

So, it’s a great job that I have. And I was very fortunate to be invited by Laura to work with the Framing the Future team. And so, I look forward to sharing what we have done together. It was a great privilege to be part of the steering committee for this effort. And yeah, it’s just exciting to see our field move forward. So, looking forward to sharing the details.

[00:03:40] Gil: Awesome. Thank you, both, so much again for joining and for all of the work that you do. I can tell in the time that we’ve spent together that your passion for your work is really inspiring. And I’m looking forward to, again, hearing a little bit about Framing the Future 2030 and what that means and, also, all the work behind it.

So, Laura, I’ll start with you, right? Can you explain what ASPPH’s Framing the Future 2030 initiative is and why you feel it’s so important?

[00:04:10] Laura: Absolutely. Well, Framing the Future: Education for Public Health 2030 is an initiative. We really spearheaded this initiative three years ago. We wanted really to make sure that we, our academic community, our practice partners, and other sectors that we invited to this initiative, we wanted to make sure we are keeping engaging our students in really training them to be ready for the current and the future challenges.

You know, our world has changed so much. We are under threat in so many ways. So, we want to make sure that our graduates have the competencies and have really the spirit and the willingness and the skills and the knowledge to really know what they were doing in just to move forward the health and the wellbeing of all the populations, actually, around the world. I forget to tell you that ASPPH is actually right now leading, also, the global network of academic institutions. We are seven regional institutions around the world, associations. So, we are now leading that.

So, this profound initiative will really impact the whole world in terms of, what are we going to be doing to train the new competencies and the new environments and, really, the new hybrid world, which we are all engaged right now? And in doing so, we’ve not only engaged, you know, people from, not just the academic but other sectors, but we really spent a lot of time really thinking about what was going on right now in higher education. And we know that higher education, right now, is really under attack. There’s so many structures and so many things that are really… we think that we are in a pivotal time. And really, right now, historically, we need to do something. There’s no time to waste. We need to really change and transform.

And this initiative is really a call for transformation, in the structural way, how higher education is a structure. And in particular, of course, we concentrated in public health education, but we looked at different aspects. I’m just mentioning some of them, but we look, for example, the global landscape. Because the global landscape is shifting the priorities and the challenges and, really, health threats around the world — climate fluctuations, the persistent racial disparities, and we’ve got that, and the intricate, really, the social determinants that are contributing, really, to health inequalities.

But we also look at technologies, right? The advance of technology and, particularly, AI, and we can talk later about that, really tapping the potential and the challenges of that new area for instructional methodologies and how that’s impacting, really, higher education.

We also looked at advances in, in the cognitive and learning science. Now, we know better. We know how an adult really learns. So, we need to really teach… we’re teaching adults. So, those adults, they really want to be more active and engaged in their own education. Not necessarily all the higher education institutions are yet there. And the bigger picture in terms of higher education as well, and how, really, now, the society is forcing higher education to be more flexible, more accessible, more relevant, and more inclusive.

The whole higher education enterprise is being really asked to do some things different according to the current needs of the students, the adults learning, and so many other things that I’m sure we’re going to tackle a little bit later.

[00:07:28] Gil: Thank you so much for sharing. I know that there’s a lot there. And we’re going to provide, just for our listeners, links to all the appropriate resources in the episode notes. So, once you’re done listening to this amazing conversation, be sure to check those out.

And so, speaking of content, I know that there are three reports published, right? And I’d love for you to give us a high level of what they’re about, their format, and what people can expect.

[00:07:50] Lisa: Sure. So, we organized our work, the way we approached all of these problems that Laura has just shared, by organizing three expert panels. And each of the expert panels produced a report. And they’re not meant to operate in isolation, but they all work together. And the first was building inclusive excellence through an anti-racism lens. And this includes recommendations to repair structural racism and discrimination and to advance inclusion in all that we do — teaching, learning, and research.

The second was transformative approaches to teaching and learning. And that report includes recommendations to transform education and public health to prepare better informed action-oriented learners across the educational continuum to attack all of these problems that surround us today worldwide.

And the third is fostering community partnerships for a healthier world. This includes recommendations for academic public health to redefine its role in advancing evidence-based public health practice in close relationship-focused partnerships with our communities.

And the structure of each of the reports is similar. Each report includes recommendations and then guiding questions that schools and programs can use to reflect, self-assess, and strategize as to how they might implement the recommendations. And the idea behind this approach was to meet schools and programs where they are. It was intentional in design, so that schools of different size, different resource capacities, working in different environments, could use these recommendations as they best fit.

And also, in each report, there are examples of initiatives that member schools and programs have tried to give ideas to others that might be able to implement them directly or extend or adapt what was done previously. And then, in addition to the three reports, there’s an executive summary that aims to pull things all together at a very high level, which might be a good place for someone to start, as they want to engage with this material.

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[00:11:00] Gil: So, Laura, what are some assumptions for higher education as a whole and education for public health in particular?

[00:11:08] Laura: Yeah, thank you for that question, because we spent a lot of time, especially the first months of the whole steering committee. And by the way, Lisa is our chair for the steering committee, has been doing an amazing job in that regard. So, we look at different areas that are happening right now in higher education as a whole and then how that is playing out in the education of public health, of course.

So, I would like to start by saying we look at the structures and we know that higher education, it used to be, still is, very silo-oriented. So, we really call for another radical transformation, how higher education functions and is structured, because the way we right now are solving problems around the world, it’s more really inter- and transdisciplinary.

So, we need to stop training the next generation of professionals as a whole just by disciplines themselves. Because the reality is that these graduates are going to be in the real world, and they’re going to start solving problems interdisciplinary. We know we need each other, so we need to start really doing those more structural changes in the higher education. And we need to start actually with the health professionals first, and then of course with others.

So, even the health professionals, we don’t do a great job of integrating knowledge and just working and training our graduates together. And of course, we more and more need more of the engineers and more of the lawyers and the other professions as well. So, there’s a big shift there in terms of really, you know, changing, transforming the structures of higher education, I would say.

We also spent a lot of time, of course, a topic that I know it’s your passion as well. So, the technological trends, right? Of course, we looked at technology and AI. And I know there’s a… it is a topic that it causes all of us, like, should we do it or not? Should be, like, guidelines? What do we do, right? And we spent a lot of time thinking about these in education. And we think that, first of all, I think it’s important just to say that it’s important to really embrace technology and what AI really brings to the table and to public health.

So, we really are embracing it. We’re thinking that, really, machines or, you know, AI, it’s not that they’re going to be, by themselves, replacing our jobs. But they are really… I mean, we’re going to be replaced by people who actually knows how to work with the machines and how to work with AI. So, that’s the fear, not really the, the AI and the machines.

So, we are really trying to embrace everything that we can. How can we prepare our students, our graduates, to really embrace more the technology and the AI capabilities, but concentrating it more in the human competencies? So, that’s extremely important in our reports that we need to then emphasize more the human competencies.

What do I mean by the human competencies? So, those are the competencies that make us actually more humans. Like, I’m talking about resiliency, I’m talking about empathy, I’m talking about compassion and leadership. So, what are the competencies, the cross-cutting competencies that actually is going to make us even more human?

So, actually, that’s a good thing that’s happened about technology, because now let’s leave to the technology all the ordinary tasks, right? And then, let’s just concentrate more in the more of the human competencies. So, we’re trying to have also more of that in our curriculums.

Another thing that I’m particularly very fascinated about is the whole topic about the lifetime of learning, meaning that we really are urging to higher education to think that we need a new social contract from higher education and learners.

Some of the issues that we were studying here is that life is changing so much. Even from the perspective of longevity, we know that people who actually are born right now, they’re going to be able to live, hopefully, 90 and 100 years. That means that they’re going to be working until they’re, what, 75 years old in order to really can, can afford to go to retirement.

So, there are people that are already talking about we need a 60-year curriculum. What does that mean? That, maybe, we’re expecting that people is going to really work and stay working for 60 years. So, that means that we really need to prepare our students to not for just two years, three years, four years, and then go out to the workplace. But we need to really have a cost, a new social contract where individuals can actually come back to the universities, to higher education, during all their lives, in order to have the competencies that they need, because life is changing. Competencies are changing. We don’t even know right now, what are the new jobs?

And you and me know that, you know, in the next five years, who knows what the new jobs are going to be? We are actually training our students for jobs that I’m sure they not even exist yet, right? So, what are the competencies that really matters right now? And then, we want to allow our students to come back, to come back, to come back.

So, if that’s important for the whole higher education enterprise, it’s extremely important for public health, just because public health and the needs of the public are changing so much. And it’s going to change more. Because of AI and technology, we need the students to come back and come back and come back.

But by saying that, I mean, you cannot imagine, we need to start imagining the changes in our higher education institutions in order to allow for that new contract, but also in the workplace. We need to think that the workplace has to allow all of our students, all of us, to come back to learning all the time. So, right now, learning and working is just really one… is just one thing around all of your life. So, that’s more, like, the lifelong learning.

So, I stop there. So, I let Lisa talk about that as well. So, those were just some of the things that we were, you know, thinking when we developed the reports.

[00:16:54] Gil: Yes, and that’s a lot to unpack. And I do encourage our listeners to download the full reports and recommendations in the episode notes. Lisa, I’d love to follow up to what Laura was just talking about, where the rubber hits the road for folks, right? I’d love for you to share, because I know you’re close to it, some of the recommendations that the reports mention and what the plans are for implementation.

[00:17:15] Lisa: Sure. Yeah. In the Building Inclusive Excellence Through an Anti-Racism Lens Report, our panel recommended that schools and programs create and support inclusive and anti-racist teaching, learning, and working environments by articulating norms and values, by supporting and training our constituents. And these include our students, our staff, our faculty, administrators, our partners. Building systems and structures to bolster our efforts and, really, most importantly, I think we felt is establishing partnerships and resources to sustain our efforts and ensure accountability. We felt very strongly in our panel that we all need to be accountable to this work to move it forward.

In the transformative approaches to teaching and learning report, that panel recommended that schools and programs center civic engagement, cross sectoral collaboration, and community partnerships as essential for learning, and that we ground public health in collective action to assess and address social determinants of health, and that we use active learning to assure evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning. And I hope you’re hearing the connection between what Laura is saying, big picture, and how these recommendations actually came to be.

And then in our Fostering Community Partnerships report, that panel recommended that we position academic public health in close partnership with communities, that we deploy strategies to support and sustain successful partnerships, and that we deliver curricula to prepare our graduates who can actually effectively partner with our communities to move the needle and really make a difference.

In terms of implementations, there will be an implementation team formed by ASPPH who will lead all of this. But just, you know, as we’re launching this and sharing what’s happening, one thing that’s important is these recommendations are really a lot around process as opposed to outcomes. There are outcomes, for sure, but there’s a lot about process here. The deliberative guiding questions in each report were really designed to allow individual schools and programs, given their unique context and environments, to self-assess in terms of where they are and what might be the appropriate next steps.

And so, this is not a recipe book that says every school must now develop a course on X. These are strategies that different schools and programs might employ so that, collectively, as a field, we transform education for public health. It’s not about any one school or program. These recommendations were really meant to be a collective action.

And so, what we’re hoping to see over the coming weeks and months, as these reports have started to filter out to schools and programs, is that people engage with these. People actually practice with these deliberative questions, that they’re sharing them with the appropriate committees and colleagues and partners within their schools and programs. And one of recommendations that cuts across all of our reports is that we, as member schools and programs of ASPPH, share what we’re doing. And we built that into developing the recommendations, and we want to continue that effort, so that it really is meant to be a team effort to move our field forward.

And we see that happening by us all working much more closely together and sharing what we’re doing, so that we’re not reinventing the wheel, but instead we’re supporting each other so that everybody moves forward.

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[00:21:53] Gil: So, I love this conversation. I love the direction that we’re heading. I think that the listening audience will appreciate, kind of, a clear and concise, what is our call to action, right? What are we expecting will become of this initiative? So, I’ll ask that question to you both. We’ll start with Laura.

[00:22:15] Laura: Absolutely. Thank you so much. So, I think that ASPPH really advocates through these reports, we’re at transformative, really transformative shift in preparing the learners to address community health needs and fostering collaboration with a broader spectrum of partners. So, this is a shift, because we are so much concentrating in, yes, the population’s health through our own lenses.

We really need a community here. We really need a corporate here. We really need our national partners here. This is, we need to align, and we need to really, you know, be together in order to really move the needle. And we need to be serious about that. So, with this transformation, schools and programs can really succeed and continue to succeed in their core mission of producing, really, the graduates that we need who can collaborate and lead in safeguarding, ensuring the population’s health, which, more and more, is getting more challenging to do that. But we will do it if we really make the changes and transformations that our schools and programs need. And of course, higher education enterprise also.

So, I just want to say this, that the consequence of inaction are profound. So, continue disconnect from community priorities or the erosion of, we all know, the public trust and the inability to really respond effectively to the evolving health challenges is just, we cannot bear that.

So, navigating this transformation demands really systematic, systemic, and strategic approaches in all our schools and programs. Urgency must be a knowledge. We really need it, and we need it now. But we also know that small consistent steps are crucial for the institutions. And as Lisa was saying, it’s not, like, this is not a recipe. It’s just like, there are questions. So, schools and programs can really assess where they are and where they need to start.

And everybody will start in a different place, and that’s all right. But we really need to start somewhere, right? And we, individual schools and programs, need to just set up, what are their goals, individual goals in order to move forward this pathway?

So, the boldness required for change really must be embraced, as the risks of inaction, again, are really substantial. So, without embracing the new strategies and initiatives, education for public health really risks becoming outdated and ineffective in addressing really the contemporary health issues. So, collaborative efforts grounded in diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice are really imperative for, really, an informed decision-making and fostering resilient solutions, which exactly that’s what our world needs in order to really advance in the wellbeing and health of all the populations and all the diverse populations that we have, not only here, but around the world.

That’s what I would say.

[00:25:13] Gil: Awesome. And Lisa, how about you?

[00:25:15] Lisa: Well, Laura really said it all. So, I may be saying the same thing, but maybe slightly differently. The last comment about social justice and equity, those words appear in almost every school and program’s mission statement. So, I see these recommendations as supporting what schools aim to do anyway.

So, it’s about, how can we put our own missions into action and really make our missions come alive? So, I think the intent is already there. These are just ways to help us move forward. And public health, we’ve seen, cannot operate alone to deal with the challenges. And so, it’s essential that we work collaboratively and in partnership with many different people — as Laura has said, lawyers, architects, planners, groups that maybe we never worked with before. We have to build those bridges now.

And when we organize ourselves to address the issues that were presented to us, we created these three cross-cutting panels. And the way we see them working together is, the inclusive excellence piece is foundational. If we don’t have every voice at the table being heard and valued, then there’s no way we can transform education and there’s no way we can strengthen our partnerships.

So, all of these things have to work together so that we can generate health for everyone every day.

[00:26:49] Gil: Thank you, both, so much for all this work. I know it’s a lot. And like I mentioned, earlier to our listeners, we’re going to put links to all of these resources in our episode notes. But I want to just take a moment to show my gratitude for all of this effort and the impact that it will make. So, I’m thanking you in advance for all of the outcomes.

So, once again, listeners, we appreciate you joining us, and we will see you all next time on FYI.

[00:27:16] Lisa: Bye![00:27:17] Laura: Thank you, all.

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