This virtual gallery represents a selected sample of outstanding student projects completed in the Spring of 2020, as part of Professor Sue J. Goldie’s undergraduate course, Gen Ed 1063: World Health: Challenges and Opportunities.

The course, held as a part of the Harvard College Program in General Education, examines the extraordinary changes in the world that present both risks and opportunities to health—unprecedented interconnections across borders, rapidly shifting global demographics, and changing patterns of diseases and injuries. The course emphasizes interdisciplinary thinking, encourages active student engagement, and utilizes projects rather than exams -structured to link classroom concepts to contemporary events.

At the start of the course students were told, “This course has no prerequisites aside from an open mind, curiosity about alternative perspectives, a willingness to self-reflect, and a commitment to be present and engage – with the issues we will discuss, the products you will make, and the learning community we will create. The concepts and issues you will encounter in this class are relevant to the most salient societal challenges you will confront beyond your college years. The skills you will develop – from data literacy and quantitative reasoning to critical thinking and interdisciplinary analysis – will prepare you for problem solving in a globalized context.”

For their final assignment, students were asked to systematically analyze a societal health challenge that they were passionate about, and to create a “problem-inspired” product intended to influence policy, motivate action, and inspire real-world change. While the analytic component assessed critical thinking skills, the “call to action” component encouraged students to step beyond their comfort zone, think outside the box, and take risks.

Student projects represented a phenomenal breadth of issues across the global health landscape, from COVID-19 in U.S. migrant communities, increased antenatal care among young mothers in rural India, to suicide risk trends and mental health amongst college students in South Korea. The diversity reflected in their creative choices was stunning—students created policy analyses, multimedia videos, educational podcasts, campaigns for social change, paintings, web site, and children’s books.

The 28 student projects in this gallery were selected for their exceptional, inspired qualities, creative thinking, and analytic clarity. Projects are organized into three primary categories: Art and Multimedia, Digital Media, and Policy Briefs.

Click on the portals below to explore our virtual student project gallery and read corresponding artist statements and supporting materials. Note: Materials have been lightly copyedited for consistency.

Multimedia campaign products

Multimedia campaigns are a creative and inspiring format that raise awareness and draw attention to public health issues at the community and population level. Students who chose this format were asked to choose a specific target audience in order to focus the campaign's motivation to change the thinking or behavior of those individuals. Effective campaigns had the traits of being specific (what was the precise problem being addressed), measurable (what was the desired outcome and how could the solution be measured to quantify change), achievable (was it actually feasible for the target audience to change their behavior given the context), and relevant (did student goals align with the audiences' tangible goals).

POLICY BRIEFs

Policy briefs are compelling overviews of a problem intended to motivate action to tackle a broad social problem. Students who chose to construct a policy brief were asked to provide a clear description of a problem, articulate necessity of intervention, and persuasively present evidence-based and pragmatic strategies for tackling it. An effective brief would convince a specific audience that a health problem matters, identify the challenges involved in addressing the issue, clearly present a set of available and feasible options to address that problem, add cogent arguments for and against these options, and make specific recommendations to motivate action to address the problem.

The origin of gen ed 1063

Since its inaugural year, more than 1,500 students have taken the General Education course developed in 2010, SW24: Global Health Challenges: The Complexities of Evidence-Based Policy. In 2019, we revisited the original curriculum through the lens of the renewed Harvard College Program in General Education, and reimagined the course through the lens of “urgent problems and pressing questions” in order to “explicitly connect the content in the classroom, to the people they will become and their world beyond the university”. After field testing new approaches to structure, pedagogy, and assessment the new curriculum included a modular format that emphasized interdisciplinary thinking, encouraged active student engagement in large and small groups, enhanced assignments that linked classroom concepts to current events, and replaced exams with projects.