ETEC 511 – IP #5 – Global Health

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Global Health and Its Impact on Education

The COVID-19 global pandemic was a reminder that global health directly affects global education. When we refer to global health, we should ensure we include humans, as well as animals, plants, and the environment and the interrelationship of all of these elements.

Investing in education can contribute to improved overall global health because they are both interconnected in several ways. Education can impact global health positively as advancements in research, new treatments, vaccines, and health care can help improve the health quality of our communities. Education can be useful to prevent people contracting infectious diseases, expand their knowledge of nutrition, and provide resources to access adequate health care. Education, including but not limited to educational institutions, can be used to prevent some diseases or expand our knowledge of health issues such as nutrition, hygiene, and reproductive health. Global economics are affected because of the increased health care costs around illnesses, sometimes causing families to suffer financially or make sacrifices such as school or job absenteeism, or dropping out of school to contribute financially or to care for sick family members. Global health affects the quality of education because it impacts the cognitive development and academic performance of students; if basic nutritional and health needs are not being met, students will struggle to learn. It can also affect students and teachers who do not want to return to in-person learning as they would be putting themselves at risk for infections. Global health also disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including Indigenous communities and women causing even more detrimental health disparities (OpenAI, 2023).

It is undeniable that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education, at least our traditional view of what education is. Children were at home with caregivers while educators attempted to adapt to provide continuity of learning. Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light assumptions and biases about what “education” actually is, exposed those who were unwilling to adapt, and highlighted “many pre-existing poor teaching practices (Czerniewicz et al. 2020, as cited in Boys, 2021, p. 17).

Prior to the pandemic, an assumption about effective education was that learning could only happen in-person, face-to-face, even when there was research that concluded otherwise (Boys, 2021, p. 19). It also highlighted what constitutes evidence of learning, who gets noticed, who has “preferred character traits”, and who is “invisible” (Boys, 2021, p. 19). It also highlighted assumptions on who is valued and deserving of education, leaving certain genders, race, classes, abilities, or sexualities seen as inferior and therefore excluded or “misfitting” for education (Boys, 2021, p. 18). Examples of this would be children of different abilities excluded from the traditional classroom setting or if a school is an unsafe space for students who are gender expansive. This highlighted the need for developing new, innovative, and equitable learning for all as we lived through a global pandemic together. Researchers and educators realized that there were problems with how education has been traditionally carried out and alliances such as COVIDEA have been created post-pandemic because they believe digital tools and resources should be easily accessed by all to help transform our education system. We have moved beyond seeing education as an intellectual process and are moving towards a holistic, interconnected view between humans, non-humans, and the global environment around us as well as elements that promote collective well-being such as character education, judgement, resilience, social awareness, responsible and active citizenship (COVIDEA, 2020; Ewart, 2024).

Lessons we learned from the pandemic included how education children received when they were at home was inadequate, math achievement scores suffered, educators were not held accountable for their students’ learning outcomes, and the mental and physical health of educators and students suffered since people were working in isolation (Kuhfeld et al., 2020; Bennette, 2020). Unfortunately, since administrators had not been through his before, there was no unified plan on what the expectations from either students or educators were and therefore students were not incentivized to continue learning when marking practices were removed. The most disheartening issue illuminated was that the “digital divide” was more obvious than in the past and it was the lower income communities without access to internet, technology, or the means to help children at home struggled most (Burgess et al., 2020; Bennette, 2020). Additionally, it challenged underlying assumptions that that online education is “inherently inferior to face to face” (Boys, 2021, p. 16).

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 is still affecting our health and education systems and probably will for years to come and is providing a “new foundation” on which educational technology is being built. The pandemic highlighted the interconnectedness of global health and how a pandemic affects and influences our education systems at all levels – from early to higher education. It shone a light on what was already happening in education – for better or worse. It challenged assumptions of what “education” is and that it does not have to be in-person. Some programs and universities, such as the UBC MET program, were already effectively using technology as a tool for education pre-pandemic and utilized the affordances of technology for learning. With more research being done post-pandemic and realizing where education can be reformed and improved, we can make changes using an evidence-based approach and “suitable learning design” to teaching and learning (Boys, 2021, p. 27).

References

Bennette, P. W. (2020, July 20). The educational experience has been substandard for students during COVID-19. Policy Options.

Boys, J. (2021). Exploring inequalities in the social, spatial and material practices of teaching and learning in pandemic times. Postdigital Science and Education, 4(1), 13-32.

Burgess, S., & Sievertsen, H. H. (2020, April 1). Schools, skills, and learning: The impact of COVID-19 on education. Vox.

COVID Education Alliance (COVIDEA). (2020, October). COVID EDUCATION ALLIANCE (COVIDEA) Adapting education systems to a fast changing and increasingly digital world using relevant technologies and online resources. COVIDEA Primer.

Ewart, K. (2024). Global Health [Class handout]. WebCampus. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/130938/pages/global-health?module_item_id=6328308

Koplan, J. P., Bond, T. C., Merson, M. H., Reddy, K. S., Rodriguez, M. H., Sewankambo, N. K., Wasserheit, J. N., & Consortium of Universities for Global Health Executive Board. (2009). Towards a common definition of global health. The Lancet, 373(9679), 1993–1995.

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E., & Lewis, K. (2020, December 3). How is COVID-19 affecting student learning? Question 2. Brown Center Chalkboard, Brookings.

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat