Preparing Public Health Professionals to Address Social Injustices Through Critical Service-Learning

The 2020 summer of protests for racial justice amid continued police violence coupled with the widening health disparities due to COVID-19 have made the need for social change and community-informed public health practice abundantly clear. Public health professionals need to combine public health knowledge with collaboration, communication, and reflection to address these health disparities and social injustices. Likewise, as public health educators, we need to develop curricula that train students in these complex skills in order to be effective practitioners. To do this, public health schools and programs should adopt critical service-learning as a central pedagogy in curricula because it is specifically designed to address our current crises with its combination of practice, research, and reflection that together aims for social change. As a means of institutionalizing the pedagogy, faculty can practice and advocate for resources as faculty champions of service-learning.