122 Embedding ESD in Public Health Nutrition

Discipline: Health and Welfare

Programme: BSc Human Nutrition

Student Engagement: 36 students registered to the module in Public Health Nutrition Autumn Trimester 2024/2025

Keywords: Problem-based learning, systems thinking, concept map, public health

Initiative Description

Public Health Nutrition is defined as ‘The art and science of promoting population status via sustainable improvements in the food and nutrition system. Based on public health principles, it is a set of comprehensive and collaborative activities, ecological in perspective and intersectoral in scope, including environmental, educational, economic, technical and legislative measures’.

In this final year module, students build on their learning from the first three stages of their degree which provides a scientific understanding of how nutrients are derived from food and utilised by the body to maintain human function. They learn how nutritional imbalance can cause or lead to disease or ill health and the diets that can contribute to good health outcomes.

Public Health Nutrition provides a wider perspective for students to understand what leads to nutrition imbalances in a population. The subject applies core public health skills such as epidemiology to explore the ‘causes of the causes’ of nutrition-related health. Through the learning and assessment, students begin to recognise the complexity of nutrition problems in the population which are rarely straightforward and require multilevel, multicomponent interventions and policy solutions. It is designed to foster a systems thinking approach to understanding complex problems and working within the system to identify potential solutions.

Collaboration, Partnerships & Student Participation

This case study was developed with the support of colleagues within the UCD Education for Sustainable Development project. Students registered to the module were invited to reflect on whether they recognised the ESD competencies.

Intended Learning Outcomes

The learning outcome associated with this case study was for students to demonstrate the ability to critically analyse current findings from nutritional epidemiological studies on the determinants of nutritional health problems.

Teaching and Learning Approach

The module uses a problem based learning approach to learning for students. Students are introduced to key concepts in epidemiology and learn to apply them in a practical setting by solving a real world problem through critical review of health research evidence. Whilst the module was not specifically designed with an ESD focus, the core competencies were implicitly embedded in the module. The aim was to explore how this approach could be used as a base to create a meaningful linkage ESD that could be further developed.

Assessment Strategy

Students are divided into groups of 4 and assigned a real world public health problem in a particular region, such as Vitamin A deficiency in India. They then use a collaborative approach to look for evidence to describe the problem and to critically identify the determinants of the problem with evidence from peer reviewed literature. The evidence must be presented in the form of a concept map with linkages identified to illustrate the complexity of the problem, the ‘causes of the causes’ and to introduce the concept of systems thinking.

Impact & Outcomes

A sample of n=36 students completed a Google Form survey. The following proportions of students agreed that the assessment helped them to understand the respective competency:

The students also provided comments which overall reflect a different way of thinking as an impact of their learning including ‘thinking upstream’ and ‘outside the box’.

Student feedback demonstrated an awareness of the core competencies, albeit without explicitly framing them as ESD competencies. Subsequent iterations of the module will articulate the learning objectives more explicitly, ensuring their alignment with these core competencies.

Best Practices & Resources — Top Tips

• Consider how one or more of the sustainable development goals aligns with the content of your module.
• Use current and past ‘real world’ problems as a way of developing the competencies.
• Encourage students to view the problem with the perspective of the ‘real world’ decision maker or stakeholder e.g. a government minister, a company manager.