ESH4100 – Education for Sustainable Health
Schedule, syllabus and examination date
Course content
This course aims to provide students with an understanding of the pedagogical 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, then connect these to challenges to sustainable healthcare and finally, learn how to teach these competencies to others in their own teaching and mentoring. The course will utilize various methods for ensuring that students both learn to utilize pedagogical tools for analyzing wicked problems connected to sustainable health but also to showcase how the students themselves can learn others to utilize these competencies.
Learning outcome
Knowledge
A student who has completed this module of the Honours certificate will be able to:
- Explain the relationship between sustainable development, health, and UNESCO's competencies to tackle challenges to sustainable health
- Account for the political paradoxes and tensions inherent in sustainability thinking in general and in sustainable healthcare in particular
- Describe pedagogical methods for working with and teaching sustainable healthcare such as collaborative real-world learning; vision-building exercises such as future workshops, scenario analyses, fore/back casting; analysis of complex systems through case studies, stakeholder analysis, actor analysis, modelling and systems games
- Account for the history and usage of education for sustainability 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 UNESCO's 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
- Jointly design empirical projects on sustainability and health
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
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.
This course is part of the Honors certificate
This course is only available for students admitted to this certificate.
Teaching
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 group project.
Classes will mainly be held between 16:00 and 18:00 in the afternoon.
Compulsory activities:
- The course requires at least 80% attendance. Attendance will be registered.
- Submission of a group project description in Canvas at the end of the spring semester as well as an individual reflection note which will focus on individual reflections around key competencies for sustainable healthcare education.
- Presentations of group projects.
Examination
Written group assignment
At the end of the course (autumn semester) students submit a final group report based on the research project they have designed and carried out over the last two semesters.
Compulsory activities have to be completed to be eligible to take the exam.
Grading
The Board at the University of Oslo has decided to introduce detailed guidelines for all examinations, which take place at the University. The description of the grading should be clear and transparent. This is done to ensure alignment between learning outcomes, assignments, and grading. The Faculty of Medicine has developed a web page with information regarding exams and the grading procedures (norwegian version).
Submit assignments in Inspera
You submit your assignment in the digital examination system Inspera. Read about how to submit your assignment.
Use of sources and citation
You should familiarize yourself with the rules that apply to the use of sources and citations. If you violate the rules, you may be suspected of cheating/attempted cheating.
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.
Explanations and appeals
Resit an examination
Withdrawal from an examination
It is possible to take the exam up to 3 times. If you withdraw from the exam after the deadline or during the exam, this will be counted as an examination attempt.
Special examination arrangements
Application form, deadline and requirements for special examination arrangements.