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Critical concept analysis in health education

Effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education requires critical attention to "sustainability" and other health political concepts.

About the group

Our point of departure is that effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education requires robust engagement with the controversies they continue to generate globally rather than uncritical agreement on their content as understood within limited local spaces.

SHE therefore invests in developing and adopting teaching strategies that foster collaborative critical reflection about "sustainability" and other core concepts in the SDGs, how such concepts are co-opted and used for different ideological purposes.

As part of this overall agenda, we have been creating a large suite of freely accessible electronic corpora (the Oslo Medical Corpus, OMC), accompanied by a novel, open-source corpus analysis and visualization interface, to support a wide range of conceptual studies. 

As part of this agenda, we plan to implement educational activities modelled on hackathons (events in which diverse professionals work together on software development) that will allow the collective analysis of corpus data in the classroom.

Similar to hackathons, our datathons will bring experts from different disciplines (in this case students) together in teams over a short period to tackle complex questions based on collective, live analysis of data. Designed as part of the Circle U Chair of Global Health agenda, these datathons will promote empirically-informed reflection and debate and enhance students’ analytical skills. 

Datathons are envisaged as student-led, highly interactive and will consist of live, hands-on, brainstorming sessions in which students will interrogate the OMC and be exposed to different and novel interpretations of the data arising from their own analysis or the analysis of other datathon participants.

They will be trialled and implemented into the study programs at the Faculty of Medicine (including the planned honors certificate in sustainability education) and in collaboration with Circle U partners.

SHE’s educational agenda also includes organizing training the trainer workshops in which students and staff will be coached in conducting corpus-based analysis in education. The OMC will ultimately offer an open access and continuously evolving resource for students and researchers at SHE, Circle U universities, and beyond.

Published June 9, 2022 12:48 PM - Last modified Sep. 29, 2023 2:58 PM