Public health educators are responsible for facilitating the development of students’ critical health promotion competence, including knowledge of the impact of the inequitable distribution of structural and systemic privilege and power, and the critical reflection skills to enable, mediate, and advocate for health equity. This project-based learning (PBL) initiative aims to develop public health students’ critical health promotion competence.
In this project, students work collaboratively to critique a real-world health promotion project to assess alignment with the values and principles of critical (best practice) or selective health promotion practice. The Red Lotus Critical Health Promotion Model and accompanying critical reflection heuristic provide the framework and tool for the critique. Through reflection on student feedback together with application in practice and research, we identified the need to evolve the heuristic into a quality assessment tool including reflective questions and a scoring system. In 2023 we published QATCHEPP: A quality assessment tool for critical health promotion practice.
This PBL facilitates knowledge about critical health promotion values and principles, reflection skills to identify them in practice, and skills to use reflection findings to advocate for orientation of health promotion action toward a critical approach. An essential component of the project was the use of the RLCHPM and heuristic\QATCHEPP to scaffold the combination of independent and interactive learning. More emphasis is needed on assessment of reflection related competence. Future public health education would benefit from greater use of PBL to develop students’ critical health promotion competence.