Required & Elective Coursework
Required Courses
The Penn Experience (PhD & Medical Students)
“The Penn Experience: Racism, Reconciliation, and Engagement.” is an entirely asynchronous non-credit course created by SP2 in collaboration with Penn’s School of Dental Medicine. The objective is to establish common language and concepts to facilitate subsequent difficult conversations about race, racism, and differences in the classroom and beyond. Using video interviews, presentations, short readings, and podcasts, the course highlights the significance of Penn’s and Philadelphia’s history of racism and other forms of oppression, Penn’s evolving relationship with West Philadelphia, and Penn’s efforts toward greater engagement and inclusion on campus and off. The modules—a total of six, requiring around 20 hours— also focus on implicit bias, restorative justice, intercultural communication, gender identity, forms of oppression, allyship, disability rights, and disparities in healthcare. A final module addresses the antiracist work that must be done to dismantle white supremacy.
NGG 5900: Research & Community: Biomedical Science in the Urban Curriculum (PhD Students Only)
ABCS
Instructor: Lori Flanagan-Cato
NGG 5900 is an activity-based course with three major goals. First, the course is an opportunity for biomedical graduate students to develop their science communication skills and share their enthusiasm for neuroscience with high school students at a nearby public high school in West Philadelphia. In this regard, Penn students will prepare demonstrations and hands-on activities to engage local high school students, increase their knowledge of science, and ultimately promote their interest in science-related careers. Second, the course will consider the broader educational context, such as the conditions of the local high school and its overall progress in science education. Students will discuss the problems they encounter and learn how to develop effective proposals, taking into account the participants and the origins of current policies. Third, students will reflect and discuss the important connection between their biomedical research at Penn and the local Philadelphia community.
Educational Pipeline Program (Medical Students Only)
The Educational Pipeline Program is a partnership between PSOM and the Netter Center that works closely with the School of Veterinary Medicine, the Masters of Public Health Program, the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management, and West Philadelphia high schools (i.e. Mastery Charter School - Shoemaker Campus, Paul Robeson High School, West Philadelphia High School, and William L. Sayre High School) to provide mentorship and education for high school students while exposing them to a variety of careers in medicine, public health, research, management, and other healthcare-adjacent fields. Fall programming is integrated into the high school science curriculum during the school day, and the spring component operates at PSOM and the Veterinary School as an afterschool program.
The mission of the Educational Pipeline Program is to encourage high school students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine to aspire to medical science careers. The Educational Pipeline Program provides mentorship and education at all levels: high school students are taught by undergraduates and graduate students; undergraduates learn from graduate students; and graduate students are guided by physicians. Further, the Pipeline Program provides a valuable means for college students, medical trainees, physicians-in-training, and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania to contribute meaningfully to their surrounding community while simultaneously advancing teaching, learning, and research at Penn.
Bridging the Gaps (Medical Students Only)
Bridging the Gaps (BTG) links the provision of health-related service for under-resourced and marginalized populations with the interprofessional training of health and social service professionals. BTG works to support partnering community organizations sustain and/or extend essential service, including addressing the inequitable systems in place that disproportionately impact their client/patient populations, while working to produce a cohort of health care professionals who understand the interplay of biological, psycho-social, economic and environmental influences on health, as well as the importance of meaningful communication and inter-professional collaboration in responding to the inequities that impact health. The overall BTG program includes a summer Community Health Internship Program (BTGCHIP) in all program locations, and two additional program components for PSOM medical students during the academic year: the Seminar Series and the Community Health Rotation. BTG is a regional program, reaching across Pennsylvania into New Jersey. Now in its 33rd program year, BTG has over 6,000 alumni and has worked with over 600 non-profit organizations serving marginalized populations.
CLINICOM Leadership (Medical Students Only)
First and second year PSOM students work with community organizations in clinical and non-clinical partnerships throughout Philadelphia (see: https://www.med.upenn.edu/idealmed/studentledclinics.html). Student representatives from each of these community programs work collaboratively in CLINICOM, the student leadership group for all these programs. Student leaders meet monthly to identify opportunities for collaboration, support and new programs. They assist each other with clinical and organizational problems. They also lead Clinicom’s “Reflection Project” each semester. The Reflection project brings together community partners, faculty advisors, senior class members and student participants in each clinic to spend time reflecting together on their collaborative work, what students have learned, what challenges and opportunities they have identified and new opportunities for collaboration. The CLINICOM leader organizes the project, which is led by OWLS- (Older, Wiser, Learning Still!) - senior students who have returned from clerkship year to mentor first and second year students. In addition to representatives from each clinic, students elect three CLINICOM leaders who work closely with the Assistant Dean for Community Engagement and IDEAL MEd administration to organize and oversee all CLINICOM meetings and projects.
Elective Courses
The following courses are suggestions for elective coursework. Please note that the courses listed below are not necessarily offered every year. Alternative elective coursework can be approved by the faculty advisory committee.
Many of these courses are Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) courses, including required course NGG5900. ABCS elective courses are indicated in the below descriptions.
Focus on Education
EDUC 5700: EXPANDING CIVIC & POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH IN WEST PHILADELPHIA
ABCS
Instructor: Rand Quinn
Preference given to EDPL students before December 1. Open as elective after that date. This Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) class is designed for Penn students who are interested in contributing to youth civic engagement efforts in Philadelphia. Over the course of the semester, our class will (a) research and develop project-based workshops on environmental justice, (b) run these workshops in local public high school classrooms, and (c) study and report on the impact of our efforts. Our ultimate goal is to identify strategies that encourage young people to become more informed and active citizens.
This is a special topics course, so the topic and titles may vary from term to term. This specific offering may not be available each term.
EDUC 5100: MATH TUTORING IN URBAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
ABCS
Instructors: Caroline Ebby, Joy Anderson Davis
This course is a collaborative tutoring partnership between public elementary schools in West Philadelphia, Penn GSE faculty, and Penn undergraduate and graduate students. The service component of the course is focused on the provision of one-to-one high-impact tutoring for foundational math concepts and skills in the early grades. Competence with early math has been shown to be predictive of later math achievement as well as academic success in general. The overall goal of the tutoring component is to increase math confidence, engagement, and number sense and will include conducting a pre and post-assessment and up to 12 in-school tutoring sessions. In the course, students will learn about mathematics education and the communities in which they will serve, unpack and reflect on conceptions of help in academic contexts, interrogate the "achievement gap" and racialized experiences with mathematics, develop an understanding of important concepts in early mathematics as well as research on how students learn those concepts, and refine their tutoring skills (e.g., how to ask effective questions, how to support productive struggle, the role of concrete and visual models). Students will also be guided to reflect on the implications of their work as tutors within the context of the longstanding, dynamic relationship between Penn and the West Philadelphia community.
This is a special topics course, so the topic and titles may vary from term to term. This specific offering may not be available each term.
EDUC 5281: Language Teaching & Literacy Development in Multilingual Community Context.
ABCS
Instructor: Anne Pomerantz
Immigrant youth often face the dual challenge of learning a new language and learning academic content in that language simultaneously. Many educators, however, struggle to identify and implement instructional practices that acknowledge learners' strengths, while also attending to their communicative, academic, and social needs. This course brings insights and findings from sociolinguistics to bear on research on language and literacy teaching to develop a situated, interactionally mindful approach for supporting emergent bi/multilinguals. An intensive service-learning project offers course participants the opportunity to "learn by doing" by working closely with children and adolescents in one multilingual, community-based after-school setting. Although the course takes the case of English learners attending U.S. elementary and secondary schools as its starting point, discussion of the implications and applications to other national/ educational contexts is encouraged. The goal of this course is to prepare participants to provide language and literacy instruction in contextually sensitive, theoretically informed, and interactionally attuned ways.
Primarily offered in the Fall term. Priority given to students in the graduate school of education.
Focus on Anthropology & Archeology
CLST 5620 / ANTH 5220: Intro to Digital Archeology
ABCS
Instructor: Jason Herrmann
Students in this course will be exposed to the broad spectrum of digital approaches in archaeology with an emphasis on fieldwork, through a survey of current literature and applied learning opportunities that focus on African American mortuary landscapes of Greater Philadelphia. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will work with stakeholders from cemetery companies, historic preservation advocacy groups, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to collect data from three field sites. We will then use these data to reconstruct the original plans, untangle site taphonomy, and assess our results for each site. Our results will be examined within the broader constellation of threatened and lost African American burial grounds and our interpretations will be shared with community stakeholders using digital storytelling techniques. This course can count toward the minor in Digital Humanities, minor in Archaeological Science, and the Graduate Certificate in Archaeological Science.
Primarily offered in the Fall term.
ANTH 6180: Anthropology and Praxis
ABCS
Instructor: Gretchen Seuss
This course focuses on real-world community problems, engaged scholarship, and the evaluation of actively-running Penn programs intended to improve social conditions in West Philadelphia. Two trends emerge in public interest social science that students will explore through research and evaluation: 1) merging problem solving with theory and analysis in the interest of change motivated by a commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights; and 2) engaging in public debate on human issues to make the research results accessible to a broad audience. As part of the course, students will learn the foundations of anthropology, social theory, and evaluation as they work with qualitative and quantitative data while conducting an evaluation based on community and partner needs. Students will gain direct experience conducting evaluation research as a collaborative process and have an opportunity to engage in academically-based community service with a focus on social change.
Offered in the Fall term.
Focus on Public Health
NURS 5130: Obesity and Society
ABCS
Instructor: Colleen Tewksbury
This course will examine obesity from scientific, cultural, psychological, and economic perspectives. The complex matrix of factors that contribute to obesity and established treatment options will be explored.
Offered in Fall and Spring terms.
FRO 5350: Frontiers in Culinary Medicine
ABCS
Instructor: Horace Delisser
Culinary medicine is a 4-week elective that is taught by a team of culinary experts, physicians, and registered dietitians, that integrates the science of medicine and the culinary arts into an interdisciplinary experience that prepares students to promote healthy eating in their future patients. Through didactics, case-based discussions, and virtual in-the-kitchen training by professional chefs, students will learn behavior change strategies regarding diet and nutrition, as well as explore healthier diets and the use of accessible and inexpensive substitute ingredients to prepare healthy, yet tasty meals. It is anticipated this course will stimulate students to incorporate healthy behaviors into their own personal lives, and in so doing, gain more comfort and confidence in sharing these behaviors with their future patients.
IDT 2530: Foundations of Culinary Medicine
ABCS
Instructor: Horace Delisser
Foundations of Culinary Medicine is a one-year elective course for first-year medical students at the Perelman School of Medicine. Taught by a team of culinary experts, physicians, and registered dietitians, Foundations integrates advanced nutrition science and the culinary arts into a hands-on, interdisciplinary experience. Each session will run during a Module 2 organ system and disease block in order to integrate nutrition education with the basic science and clinical medicine concepts of a particular organ system. This training will provide students with the knowledge to understand the impact of healthy eating on normal human physiology and disease. Through evidence-based research, case-based discussions and in-the-kitchen, hands-on training, students will learn about the role of nutrition in integrated biological systems, with a focus on dietary recommendations for real-life patient care. Students will also learn by teaching, and partnering with Philadelphia schools and families to facilitate food educational programs and community dinners. It is anticipated that this course will provide a foundation for students to both understand and communicate the impact of good nutrition on their own health, as well as the health of their future patients.
COMM 6372: Public Health Communication Research and Evaluation in the Digital Age
ABCS
Instructor: Andy Tan
This research seminar focuses on formative and evaluation research methods used to design and examine the effectiveness of public health communication interventions in the digital age. Students will learn about behavioral change theories and program planning frameworks used to inform communication intervention design; mechanisms of how communication interventions influence health behaviors; formative research used in determining targeted beliefs, message themes, and message effectiveness; research designs to measure campaign exposure and effects. The course will emphasize unique affordances, ethical considerations, and limitations of communication interventions using digital technologies. We will explore these research topics across different settings, health issues, and populations including public health communication to promote vaccinations, tobacco cessation, mental health care utilization, cancer screening, healthy nutrition, and physical activity among others.
Offered in Spring term.
Focus on Design, Technology, & Engineering
ANTH 5830 / EDUC 5466: Ethnographic Filmmaking.
Instructor: Amitanshu Das
This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool for conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research and producing an ethnographic film as their final project. In service to that goal, students will read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and implicit assumptions about culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.
Course offered in Fall term. Special permission required.
ANTH 5467/EDUC 5467: Community Youth Filmmaking
ABCS
Instructor: Amitanshu Das
This course focuses on how the filmmaking medium and process can provide a means for engaging youth in ethnographically grounded civic action projects where they learn about, reflect on, and communicate to others about their issues in their schools and communities. Students receive advanced training in film and video for social change. A project-based service-learning course, students collaborate with Philadelphia high school students and community groups to make films and videos that encourage creative self-expression and represent issues important to youth, schools, and local communities. Stories and themes on emotional well-being, safety, health, environmental issues, racism, and social justice are particularly encouraged. A central thread throughout is to assess and reflect upon the strengths (and weaknesses) of contemporary film (digital, online) in fostering debate, and discussion and catalyzing community action and social change. The filmmaking medium and process itself are explored as a means to engage and interact with communities. This course provides a grounding in theories, concepts, methods, and practices of community engagement derived from Community Participatory Video, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), and Ethnographic methods. For the very first time, Penn students will be trained to operate a state-of-the-art TV studio at PSTV (Philadelphia Schools TV). At the end of the semester approved films will be screened with an accompanying panel discussion at an event at the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). These films will also be broadcast on Comcast Philadelphia's PSTV Channel 52 and webcast via the district's website and YouTube channel. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. EDUC 5466 Ethnographic Filmmaking (or equivalent) is a pre-requisite or permission of the instructor.
Course offered in Spring term. Special permission required.
BE 5140: Rehab Engineering and Design
Students will learn about problems faced by disabled persons and medical rehabilitation specialists, and how engineering design can be used to solve and ameliorate those problems. The course combines lectures, multiple design projects and exercises, and field trips to clinical rehabilitation facilities. Students will have substantial interaction with clinical faculty, as well as with patients.
Course offered in the Fall term.