Solutions That Stick: Activating Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in a Graduate-Level Public Health Innovations Course at the University of California, Berkeley

摘要

Since 2011 we have taught a public health innovations course at the University of California, Berkeley. Students gain skills in systematic innovation, or human-centered design, while working in small interdisciplinary teams on domestic and global health projects with client organizations. To support acquisition of meaningful problem-solving skills, we structured the course so that the majority of learning happens in scenarios that do not involve faculty. Taken by students representing 26 graduate programs (as diverse as epidemiology, city planning, and mechanical engineering), it is one of the 10 highest-rated courses offered by the School of Public Health. We present the blueprints for our course with the hope that other institutions whose students could benefit will borrow from our model. On a recent April evening in Berkeley, California, 29-year-old Aileen Suzara—her hair wrapped neatly in a multicolored, tartan bandana—stood at the center of the kitchen at La Pe?a Cultural Center, reviewing final instructions with a team of eight that was responsible for preparing and serving dinner to more than 100 guests. Dozens of customers who had prepaid for an opportunity to sample Chef Suzara’s creations were already waiting on the sidewalk outside La Pe?a. For this one night, a pop-up restaurant named Sariwa—meaning fresh in Tagalog—would create a space in which these customers could experience farm-fresh, seasonal food influenced by both Filipino and American cuisine and talk about healthy Filipino food. Such pop-up (temporary) restaurants are not unusual in the San Francisco Bay Area. What was unusual was that this was an integral part of a public health course at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to being a formally trained chef, Suzara was also a student in the Master of Public Health Nutrition program. The Sariwa pop-up was a prototype—a small-scale experiment—developed not just by Suzara, but by a team of students from the course Eat.Think.Design. They had spent the previous four months exploring the development of a new business venture anchored to the theme of revitalized Filipino cuisine. The core purpose of this venture was to improve population health by shifting the way that Filipino Americans eat and think about food. We teach the course that acted as the incubator for Sariwa. In describing the development of the course and the students it targets, we hope that our course might serve as a model for other public health institutions interested in the innovation process.