Demystifying Public Health Policy Through Service-Learning Pedagogy

Policy shapes the health of communities by enabling and limiting public health practice. Major organizations that focus on public health systems, education, and training stress the importance of policy to population health. They also recognize that practitioners should learn, practice, and be able to deploy policy skills. However, despite the recognized role of policy in public health, some public health practitioners remain uncomfortable with policy. And although teaching policy in public health programs appears on the rise, public health policy pedagogy literature is limited and tends to define policy narrowly. Service learning, which is used to teach other skills critical for public health, exhibits great promise as a tool to teach public health policy. This article describes an interdisciplinary, graduate-level public health policy course that relies on a service-learning approach. The course aims to teach public health policy principles, theories, and concepts and to make students more comfortable with public health policy through applied learning.