Flipping the Classroom and the Pedagogy: Using Active Learning Principles to Bring Leadership Training in Affirmative Sexuality to Public Health Education
With increasing frequency, public health and healthcare services scholars are putting forward proposals and strategic plans of action to improve the nation's ability to promote sexual health,1 3 including reports from the U.S. Surgeon General4 and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.5 What these proposals and plans have in common is not just their call for improved leadership and training on sexual health in general, but also the positive and affirming aspects of sexuality and sexual relationships, often referred to as an "affirmative sexuality approach."6 8 Despite the increasing interest in developing national leadership in sexual health, focused training in schools of public health that would support these goals is absent. In a simple comparison, an informal review of inclusion of nutrition and sexual health in the curricula at 51 accredited schools of public health in the United States was conducted in 2014. Not surprisingly, courses in nutrition were standard fare in the curricula, with 20% of the schools housing an academic department of nutrition. By contrast, courses covering sexual health from an affirmative sexuality perspective were rare, and none of the schools had departments of sexual health (Unpublished data. S. Bryn Austin, 2014) In another comparison, an informal PubMed search for literature on sexual health in the curricula of medical schools identified dozens of articles on the topic, including several review articles. By contrast, a similar search of the literature focused on sexual health in the curricula of schools of public health turned up no articles (Unpublished data. S. Bryn Austin, 2015) The purpose of this article is to describe a course, Women, Gender and Health (WGH) 220: Sexuality and Public Health, offered as part of the WGH Interdepartmental Concentration at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (hereinafter, Harvard Chan School) in Boston, Massachusetts, which was developed in 2007 to address the gap in affirmative sexuality curricula in schools of public health. What follows is an explanation of the pedagogical rationale and design of the course. It is hoped that this course may serve as a way for faculty and curricular planners at other institutions to introduce affirmative sexuality into their curricula while emphasizing professional competencies necessary for public health leadership in sexual health.
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