Engineering of Global Health

Introduction and Rationale

When the 2014 West African Ebola virus outbreak occurred, I was a few short months into my teaching career. My ninth-grade students had many questions – some serious, some silly – about the outbreak. These included: What is it? How is it spread? Why is it such an issue there but not here? How can it be prevented in the future? I found myself wondering how to answer some of the more serious questions regarding what led to the outbreak in the first place. I did my best to regurgitate the information I read from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other sources like the New York Times and Washington Post to my students, but I did not arrive at a personally satisfactory answer until nearly two years later when I began teaching Advanced Placement Environmental Science (APES) to a few of those same students.

In this course, I present information on human population as a way of understanding many classic environmental pressures brought about by a growing population (natural resource consumption, pollution, ecosystem disturbance, etc.). I also present information on the varied quality of life experienced by the planet’s more than seven billion people in order to set up a discussion of environmental justice further into the course, including the life expectancies and survivorship curves for populations in different parts of the globe. Life expectancy, in part, is controlled by access to clean water, food, shelter, education, and modern medicine.

During the past school year, while teaching the population chapter, I had an aha! moment that helped me arrive at a fundamental answer to the questions my ninth graders raised about why the Ebola outbreak seemed so out of control: individuals in the region of the world experiencing the outbreak did not have routine access to clean water, food, or modern medicine. This created a situation where, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), viral outbreaks are both more common and deadlier.¹ Moreover, I had a simple answer for those questions of how to prevent and/or control future outbreaks: “It’s the economy, stupid!”, as the famous political strategist James Carville so frequently shouted. As reported by the WHO, a confluence of economic restraints on hospitals and understanding of disease transmission by impacted communities paved the way for the outbreak and widespread hysteria that followed. As the world watched the crisis unfold, many world leaders and global institutions agreed that prevention and control of future outbreaks required “longer-term commitment to economic and technical support of…health care systems, roads, schools, and general development.”²  In this unit, I explore the relationship between economics and community health through the lens of the Wealth-Health Paradigm – the phenomenon that countries with higher GDPs tend to have longer life expectancies and fewer deaths from communicable diseases.³

School Profile and Course Specifics

William Penn High School is a public high school in the Colonial School District in New Castle, DE. It is the only high school in the district and the largest high school in the state of Delaware, serving almost 2,100 students grades 9-12. The school district is mostly suburban, with small portions of the district being considered urban and some being considered rural. In total, the district serves over 10,000 students and expects to serve increasing numbers of students as New Castle experiences a reemergence of industry and jobs.

In 2012 the district redesigned the high school into three separate colleges focused on improving the college and career readiness of graduates. The three colleges are the STEM College, the Humanities College, and the Business College. Within each college there are specific pathways. In the STEM College, pathways include agriculture, architecture and interior design, construction, engineering, health services, information technology, mathematics, and science. The Humanities College offers pathways in behavioral science, communications, education, legal studies, international studies, and visual and performing arts. The Business College has pathways in Junior Air Force ROTC, business administration, culinary arts, financial services, and marketing. Students must choose a pathway upon entering high school and earn three consecutive credits in that pathway in order to graduate. To best suit our students’ needs, students typically take classes with students enrolled in the same college. This fosters meaningful relationships between teachers and students and allows for targeted curriculum. This redesign has helped William Penn retain students who would otherwise attend one of the several vocational-technical or charter schools in the area. These pathways continue to grow and develop to meet the needs of our community.

Within the agriculture program, I have created a new environmental science program of study approved by the Delaware Department of Education. This program starts with students taking Introduction to Agriscience their first year; Natural Resources and Ecology their second year; Environmental Science Issues their third year; and finally APES their fourth and final year. I taught the first APES course in the most recent school year and will continue to teach the course under this new program. I used a mix of curricula in my first year teaching the course, ranging from the textbook and its resources to colleagues who teach the course elsewhere, to published units developed by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and other educational service providers. While these resources were helpful, I need to develop more personalized units moving forward to better meet the needs of my students, especially those who are part of the environmental pathway. Doing so will help create buzz about the course and program, insuring student interest and in enrollment for future years. I also aspire to appeal to students from other majors within the school. I would specifically like to tailor content to those in the health services field, which is the most popular program in the STEM College, if not the entire school. In addition, I would like to increase the cohesiveness of the AP and the recently-adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This last objective is a challenge for all AP science course teachers since NGSS focuses considerably less on content in favor of process and experiential learning. While this is may be difficult to do in the demanding world of AP scores I firmly believe that this shift will create a better learning experience for students and ultimately improve their test performance.