Students in Trinity’s Global Health Humanities Gateway, a first-year program focused on the intersection of health and the human experience, recently passed on some of their knowledge to younger students in Hartford.
At an April 26 workshop called “Navigating Health Communication in Hartford,” Trinity students taught high school students from the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy about public health and health communication they see around them. I taught them how to notice and interpret them.
Trinity students leverage the knowledge they have gained throughout the semester to spread awareness about specific public health issues through a series of presentations, small group discussions, games, and hands-on activities focused on a variety of topics. has been developed.
“The purpose of the workshop was to teach students about health rhetoric, but also to help them understand the complexities of health, given how it is communicated and expressed.” said Ella Schaffer ’27. “The activities and presentations fostered thoughtful discussion, and students shared their own experiences with health communication, which has traditionally been overlooked.”
Trinity’s Gateway Program is offered to first-year students with specific interests and experience. Each program consists of her series of two to four courses and focuses on different areas of expertise, including community work, the arts, and STEM fields.
The two-course Global Health Humanities Gateway is co-directed by Erin L. Freimeyer, instructor in the Alan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric, and Diana R. Paulin, Charles A. Dana Associate Professor of English Studies. Masu. and American Studies. The first course serves as an introduction to the field, examining how medical practice overlaps with other disciplines such as philosophy, literature, religion, film, and art. The second course gives students the opportunity to extend this knowledge into a hands-on project in the Hartford community. Students complete their capstone project by taking one course from a list of health-related electives during their first year and studying about health abroad or completing an independent community project in Hartford. To do.
“Global health humanities is a recently emerged field that uses materials and methodologies from the humanities to study health and health care,” Freimeyer said. “By leveraging the humanities, we can develop a more complete understanding of the human health experience.”
The second course in the program, “Health and Hartford Rhetoric,” will be taught by Freimeyer and will teach students how to incorporate rhetoric into medical communication, including doctor-patient interactions, medical research, and public health discussions. This course also focuses on health communication in the city of Hartford through an analysis of health messages in the Hartford area, and how health-related information in billboards, pamphlets, bus ads, radio commercials, etc. impacts society. Observe what you give. community.
“Our goal is to try to understand what medical communication looks like in and around the city,” Freimeyer said. The culmination of the course was a workshop on health communication for local high school students.
Santina Dresser ’27 said the Global Health Humanities Gateway revealed the pervasive nature of medical communication in everyday life. “These courses, which strive to bridge medicine and the humanities, provided a very unique perspective that I will be able to carry with me as I pursue a scientific career,” Dresser said.
This gateway program has existed in Trinity for many years, but this year was the first time it was directly connected to HMTCA. Freimeier said: “The goal is always to figure out how to share this analysis and make it useful or interesting to people beyond the classroom. We wanted to get this out to the community in some way. There are many opportunities for collaboration between the two institutions.”
Trinity’s partnership with HMTCA is just one of the relationships with the Hartford community supported by Trinity’s Hartford Center for Activity Research (CHER). Liliana Pauly, IDP’21, M’23, Director of Strategic Partnerships at CHER, said: “These programs are designed to strengthen and value the academic and co-curricular partnership between the Hartford community and Trinity College students, staff, and faculty, thereby creating a sense of It’s about sharing growth and development. ”
Pauly added that the Global Health Humanities Gateway workshop stands out as an example of these connections in action. “We hope that all students involved will see this workshop as an opportunity to interact and learn from their Hartford neighbors,” Pauley said. “Workshops of this kind provide insight into how teaching and research can benefit the communities around us, and how we can make meaningful connections through our work.” It shows an opportunity.”
Learn more about the many academic and co-curricular partnerships between Hartford’s diverse community and Trinity College.