ESH4100 – Education for Sustainable Health
Course content
This course aims to provide students with an understanding of the principles and tools aimed at building capabilities needed to tackle the challenges to sustainable health and healthcare. The course is intended to provide students with the means to first learn about key competencies for sustainability, and then connect these to challenges to sustainable healthcare. The course will utilize various methods for ensuring that students learn to utilize pedagogical tools for analyzing wicked problems connected to sustainable health and the impact of climate change on health.
Learning outcome
Knowledge
A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:
- Explain the relationship between sustainability and health, such as the impact on climate change on health, antimicrobial resistance, and other key sustainability challenges?
- Account for the political paradoxes and tensions inherent in sustainability thinking in general and in sustainable healthcare in particular
- Describe methods for working with sustainable healthcare such as collaborative real-world learning; vision-building exercises such as future workshops, scenario analyses, fore/backcasting; analysis of complex systems through case studies, stakeholder analysis, and actor analysis
- Account for the history and usage of sustainability as a concept and its later connection to health
Skills
A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:
- Analyze and describe complex systems and their interdependence in relation to healthcare challenges
- Critically analyze sustainability itself as a concept and discern paradoxes and tensions within sustainability thinking
- Critically reflect on what sustainable healthcare education is, how it can be used and any potential shortcomings
- Utilize various pedagogical teaching methods connected to key competencies for sustainability to analyze different ‘wicked problems’ connected to sustainability
- Work interdisciplinary in teams and constructively collaborate across disciplines on topics pertaining to sustainability
General competence
A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:
- Recognize and understand relationships of how systems are embedded within different domains and different scales and to deal with uncertainty
- Understand and evaluate multiple futures - possible, probable and desirable and to deal with risks and changes
- Understand and reflect on the norms and values that underlie one’s actions and to negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets, in a context of conflicts of interests and trade-offs, uncertain knowledge and contradictions
- Develop and implement innovative actions that further sustainability at the local level and further afield
- Reflect on your own research and dissemination practice
- Present your results clearly to a non-expert academic audience
- Cooperate productively with peers from different areas of expertise
Admission to the course
This course is part of the Honors certificate
This course is only available for students admitted to this certificate.
Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.
If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.
Teaching
The teaching is digital/hybrid.
Spring semester: Seminars, course introduction with subject instructors, guest lecturers and practitioners.
Autumn semester: Research seminars, student-led presentations and supervision, working towards a final individual home exam.
Classes will mainly be held between 16:15 and 18:00 in the afternoon.
Compulsory activities:
- The course requires at least 80% attendance. Attendance will be registered.
- Middle of spring semester the submission of an individual reflection note which will focus on?why the students applied to the certificate and why they think the topic of sustainability is relevant to health. The reflection note must be three (3) pages long (2300 characters a page without spacing)
Examination
Individual home exam (4 days)
The scope of the exam will be 3,000 words (+/-10%), excluding a reference list.
Compulsory activities must be completed to be eligible to take the exam.
Examination and grading at The Faculty of Medicine.
Language of examination
The examination text is given in English, and you submit your response in English.
Grading scale
Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about the grading system.
More about examinations at UiO
- Use of sources and citations
- Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
- Withdrawal from an exam
- Illness at exams / postponed exams
- Explanation of grades and appeals
- Resitting an exam
- Cheating/attempted cheating
You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.