Racial Justice Education: An Interprofessional Course

Overview: This ePoster represents the interprofessional collaboration at a small university to address racial and ethnic health disparities through education. The process of creating and examples of content of the racial justice course produced are presented as a model to others.Proposal text: Health disparities plague the country in all areas of health care and threaten the human rights of people of color (Byrd & Clayton, 2003). Physical therapy (Braaten, 2021), occupational therapy (Braveman & Bass-Haugen, 2009), and speech and language pathology (Morgan et al., 2017), all suffer from disparate treatment of African American and Black identifying patients and clients. Those disparities present also in education (Fish, 2019), nursing (Bennet et al., 2019), and social work services across systems of practice (Corley & Young, 2018). Educators in these fields have an obligation to challenge those future practitioners to confront their own biases and understand the common areas of disparity.
A small, private, Catholic University in the Midwest considered this educational opportunity as a way to begin to change the current health disparities. In a College of Health and Human Services, a committee with faculty from each discipline including physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, public health, education, kinesiology, physician assistant, nursing and social work entered into a collaborative process of addressing these disparities across disciplines to work to enhance the human rights of all people being treated by these future practitioners in their fields of practice. Facilitated by social work faculty and administration, the committee focused on faculty/staff education, student education, and policy change. Most notably, what emerged from the committee was a racial justice course, designed to be required of all students in the College. This course will be available to each student in the College of Health and Human Services at the university beginning in the Fall of 2022.
Eight modules, each with a specific topic to address disparities and disproportionality, emerged. Each virtual module contains an element of reading, of watching/listening, discipline specific material, and discussion boards for processing important concepts. The modules were constructed to be implemented in two ways, as either stand-alone components to be added to existing courses, or as a full complete one credit course. Implementation depends on the needs and structures of departments and schedules.
Accompanying the course, a facilitator guide was constructed to offer support to departments regarding content, triggers, and responses. The guide opens with The 6 Pillars of a Brave Space (Stubbs ,n.d.) and Five Successful Strategies to Facilitate Difficult Racial Dialogues (Sue, 2015), providing support to educators who may not be versed in this content and the process which accompanies it.
This eposter will represent the process of building both the committee and the course from an interprofessional lens and the importance of critical conversations during the course construction, the course module content areas, and one module of full materials as an example. Additionally, an excerpt from the facilitator’s manual to illustrate the support provided to instructors will be provided. This visual could provide an opportunity for other universities to undertake a process to address human rights through addressing health disparities with future practitioners. Social workers are uniquely suited to lead the charge on these critical conversations across health professions with faculty, staff and students.