🧵While walking to VU this morning to teach class for #SystemsThinking in #PublicHealth, I began pondering the challenges I experienced. Also how designing & teaching this unit has taught me much about #LearningDesign & #teaching more broadly.
All pics in this thread by me!
It does feel risky to write this thread but here we go...
It has been transformative but also I have felt profoundly alone & unsure of where there was space - apart from here - where I could safely bounce ideas around about how to address the challenges experienced in the classroom. The #LearningDesigner I work has been phenomenal...
along with Dr Silvana Bettiol, academic from @UTAS_MPH team, whose openness to discuss her challenges designing & teaching #SystemsThinking in #PublicHealth was a lifeline. Both @mishymorgs@Riley_Therese meant our content was strong, but Dr Bettiol gave me ideas, tools, options
Through @Riley_Therese I have met @leavy_justine & I am looking forward to sharing my experiences from this unit with her next week. Perhaps this could be the beginning of a conversation around the challenges I will touch on now
1. #SystemsThinking ask us to challenge the very foundations of what we are undertaking in #PublicHealth This has meant that there needs to be constant conversation in the classroom about this & how difficult this is. There are tell tale signs in the students outputs...
2. You must start your teaching on #SystemsThinking with a system ALL your students know. I never thought I would be discussing #AQFramework & VU #BlockMode & @CAPHIA1 competencies with my students but discussing these systems & how they interact was an amazing teaching moment
@CAPHIA1 3. For #PublicHealth there is significant power in discussing the #mystery of the Australian health systems with your student who are born overseas. It uncovers the gaps in their learning from previous units & I think challenges us to think about how we teach about this system
4. As #SystemsThinking is so complex & responses from students are varied, your #LearningDesign must give indications of what you will remove from your lesson plan to enable more space for conversation. This is complex #scaffolding & I think I for one need more help here!
5. Finally, a unit in #SystemsThinking within a #PublicHealth course will be more successful if other units have applied Systems Thinking to the #LearningDesign & #teaching. This has been the most significant struggle and relevant to 4 & 1 in this thread.
However...there has been incredible successes in this unit that I want to finish with - particularly with regards to students understanding of #decolonisation. #SystemsThinking has given them the bridge into understanding which continues to surprise me - ping @mishymorgs
#SystemsThinking has also given them more tools for understanding how to apply a #critical lense to the #PublicHealth research & evidence that they read for their studies. It has meant there has been hard conversations in class about what they have learnt before.
But these conversations have ended with students who are more engaged, concentrating more, & much more comfortable with asking hard questions of the content they are learning.
Finally, the case studies & involvement of our #PublicHealth network have given the students a sense of where to next which is exciting for me. They are asking more questions about how to prepare for #PublicHealth work & keen to demonstrate to the world that they are competent.
My previous unit I designed I went with what I knew, accessed people in my network occasionally & took direction from the course chair. This unit I have involved many individuals, sometimes explicitly as with our codesigners mentioned in this thread
And other times just taking advantage of moments to seek advice, ideas, thoughts. It is the inclusion of these varied views which has been instrumental in (a) changing the way I practice and (b) the creation of dynamic unit which I hope will be transformative for our students.
Side note - I want to say don't let this discourage you from hosting @WePublicHealth. Here are my tips:
1. Try & find people to tweet with u during the week. When I've hosted with even one person its made a huge difference, particularly when you've run out of ideas (or get sick)
2. Plan out the content in draft form for the week. Even if this is on a scrap of paper. You might have guessed from my tweeting this week that I had planned Mon, Tues & Thurs. I had guessed it would be easy to tweet about #IWD on Weds but I didn't plan my final 3 days.
3. Starting your tweet Acknowledging the Country on is normal practice for @Croakey but also an important choice to make when you host. Try to include photographs. As you can see thats easy for me to do but if you don't take a million pictures like me just get 7 in preparation.
Featured in this tweet and the one following are all pieces of street art from Naarm (some legal, some sneaky) that celebrate First Nations Australians. Perhaps some of you recognise where they are from?
The tram one should be familar to most Victorians and is part of @risingmelbourne 2022 First Peoples art trams rising.melbourne/wormhole/2022-… It is called Blak Love and is by Dr Paola Balla (Wemba Wemba-Gunditjmara)
This afternoon I want to start by saying that both illness & lack of internet coverage down in Somers (on Bunurong Country) threw a real spanner in the works for my @WePublicHealth tweeting 😥
Today I will be tweeting from the ‘Making Connections: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism in Australia’ conference ❤️ as well hoping to find more excellent #IWD2023 🧁 tweets, going back to the #SystemsThinking conversations & generally being random 😂
Late night tweet...which may go unnoticed...but heres hoping someone sees it & has ideas. Applying decolonisation to Learning Design for this unit (& others) meant talking about issues in #PublicHealth research & evidence. I find this to be a super complex teacher/student dynamic
Many students trust the research & evidence they've been given in their studies implicitly so when you start talking about decolonisation of #PublicHealth you ended up in a complex situation which can move towards conflict (especially if you are Indigenous or person of colour).
These women helped me to begin to build the #SystemsThinking content while the talented & patient #LearningDesigner Nick Lekakis kept me in line from a teaching & learning viewpoint.
Prior to VU I hadn't worked with a Learning Designer before, in fact I didn't know they existed!
I took this photograph yesterday afternoon on my walk from the University to my apartment. This piece by Shawn Lu is part of the #Flashfwd program which includes 40 pieces across 40 laneways.