Integrating World Religions and Global Health into a First-Year Writing Seminar: Challenges and Possibilities

It can be difficult to engage health sciences students in courses on religion, health, and medicine. Some do not see humanistic courses as relevant to their studies or practical in advancing their educational/career goals. Some discover these topics when meeting general education requirements. Yet, this can mean they find these courses later in their degree progress, making it hard for them to enroll in majors, minors, or additional courses. Seeking to expand this engagement I am designing a first-year writing seminar around the theme “world religions and global health.”

At Boston University all first-year students are required to take a two-semester seminar sequence through the writing program, with the majority beginning in their first semester. The first semester focuses on adapting to college writing and focuses on analyzing and working with sources curated by the instructor. The second semester introduces research components where students engage in independent research projects. The writing program offers a wide variety of topics for these writing seminars and most focus on humanistic or social scientific scholarship. Thus, designing a seminar that blends humanistic scholarship from religious studies with the social sciences that underlay global health fits within the writing program’s model and may appeal to undergraduate students studying the health sciences.

Many students at Boston University enter the university with a major or career field in mind and these students often double major or take extra classes in their area so that they can be competitive in graduate school or career applications. It can be difficult to convince pre-med students that engaging in religion courses, let alone minoring or double majoring in religion, can help make them more uniquely competitive on medical school applications. So, introducing them to the study of region, health, and medicine through a required seminar, where other topic choices might not be as related to their other studies, may be a fruitful way of introducing them to this study in their first semester and sparking interest that they can work into their future schedules. Even if they do not take more courses it may be an opportunity to plant some humanistic seeds in their thinking about ethics and the role of medicine in society.

A challenge is that the seminar must balance the topical material and discussion with writing instruction and practice. Because of this, I focus topical discussion around two key takeaways that are introduced in the second week of the course: that religions are not all different manifestations of a common underlying reality and that religions shape the worlds in which we live in different ways. First, we engage Stephen Prothero’s God is not One; a text that is intentionally accessible to first semester students with no previous religious studies training. Second, we engage Germond and Cochrane’s “healthworld” theory to examine how religions are part of the enculturated background and assumptions that shape understandings of health and health seeking behaviors. Over the course we read texts that engage the healthworld theory and use it as an analytical tool. Students start by reading about the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. We examine how religion shaped the healthworlds of West Africans and how global health professionals responded.

 In addition to writing traditional academic essays, which students will write about the Ebola epidemic, students also encounter another genre of the instructor's choice that makes sense for the topic. In this seminar students will practice writing memos for public health practitioners. We will engage a unit on how Islam informs nutrition and physical activity in Muslim communities. After this students will receive a prompt that a global health colleague of theirs wants to do an intervention in a predominantly Muslim community to engage either youth, women, or men in a health promotion program related to physical activity and nutrition. Students will think about what they have learned about Islam and how Islamic healthworlds may differ from a medicalized, scientific healthworld. They will need to identify differences between these healthworlds including how the five pillars shape how Muslims seek health or how the Quran and Hadiths shape Muslim healthworlds. This assignment requires students to both see Islam as an independent tradition with its own world views from other traditions and think about how this informs the practical work in which global health professionals engage.

Engaging in traditional essays and a memo allows students to engage the humanistic side of religion, health, and medicine courses that are common and also have the opportunity to reflect on and apply their learning and insights. Asking students to think practically about how they would apply what they have learned to help shape a health promotion intervention can show them how engaging the topic has helped them see the world in new ways, think critically, and can shape future practical work. This blends goals from the humanities (I.e. reflecting on what it means to be a [healthy] person and understanding how others experience the world) with goals from the applied health sciences (I.e. how to engage in effective health promotion). Overall, integrating world religions and global health into a first-year writing seminar presents an exciting opportunity to introduce health sciences students to discussions of how religions shape health and health promotion early in their undergraduate careers.