The purpose of this lesson plan is to help students synthesize their global health knowledge through visual representation. Students will create a piece of artwork through an iterative process that reflects their personal understanding of global health and participate in a facilitated discussion to reflect on the broader implications of the artwork. Using art to facilitate discussion allows students to process the class material by exploring their personal connections with the complex concepts.
Students are given a number of “country cards.” They are asked to group/arrange the cards in a way that they think reflects the gaps in the world today. Afterward, they compare their arrangement with the “Gapminder World Map” graph.
This exercise helps students think about the gaps in the world today and helps challenge preconceived ideas about how the contemporary world looks. The exercise can also be used to stimulate an interest in using statistics to understand the world.
This guide uses biology, health, and world study topics to engage students in global health issues and solutions from experiential and multidisciplinary perspectives. The guide offers an outline of how to organize and host a "Global Health Conference," and provides suggestions regarding logistics and instructions as well as resource materials for preparing and organizing a student conference. The Global Health Conference is a school event where students present display boards and two-page essays on various countries and their health challenges, very much like a science fair.
As a template, the guide can be modified to suit each educator's goals, student needs, and school policies. The guide is designed to involve all students from a single grade level—e.g., all seventh-grade students. However, educators can use pieces from the guide or tailor it to one class or a whole school. It is recommended that each educator adapt this guide to the most appropriate scale for his or her own school environment and policies, student needs, and learning outcomes.
This video segment adapted from A Science Odyssey tells how two scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, used the research findings of Alexander Fleming to turn a natural compound, penicillin, into an effective treatment for bacterial infections. Their tests in mice and later in human patients demonstrated penicillin's ability to cure such infections.
Jon Epstein is a virus hunter - he chases viruses that can cause outbreaks of infectious disease. Follow Jon as he hunts the path of the Nipah virus from fruit bats to humans in Bangladesh. This video can be played during a lesson on major outbreaks and epidemics in the world.
Learn how the recent resurgence of progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of “black lung” disease, in miners across Appalachia has been linked to the failure of coal-mine regulations to limit silica dust levels in these excerpts from Coal’s Deadly Dust | FRONTLINE, in partnership with NPR.
This video segment adapted from Rx for Survival examines malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, a disease that kills more than one million children there each year. It explains how a deadly parasite, a member of the genus Plasmodium, enters the bloodstream via a mosquito bite and how it multiplies once inside host red blood cells. The video reveals that drug counterfeiting has increased malaria's death toll and that newer drugs, while more effective than older ones, are too expensive for most Africans to acquire. The video also highlights one simple and low-cost solution—bed nets—that can be used to combat disease transmission.
This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.
This video segment from A Science Odyssey recounts the tactics employed by San Francisco's health officials to prevent the bubonic plague from reaching America's West Coast. Using physical examinations, quarantines, and deportation, city officials hoped to isolate disease-carrying immigrants from the general population. They also disinfected people and fumigated properties where disease-carrying rodents were thought to exist. Following the 1906 earthquake, medical research began to consider rats, rather than humans, as the vector responsible for transmitting the disease. Scientists in India discovered that, in fact, it was the fleas carried by rats that were ultimately responsible for transmitting bubonic plague from diseased rats to humans.
