First Year Seminar 191PHHS14 - FYS-U-Thrive: SPHHS

This seminar will support your transition to college and introduce you to a topic in public health and health sciences. The first six weeks will provide foundational skills for students to thrive at UMass. The last seven weeks will focus on exploring a public health and health sciences topic.

First-year (R1ST) Course subtitle: The Power of Storytelling in Public Health

Course topic description: This seminar explores critical narrative intervention as a powerful, participatory, and justice-oriented approach to public health. Students will engage with foundational concepts like health equity, social determinants of health, intersectionality, and counternarratives while learning how storytelling can help to co-create knowledge, challenge dominant narratives, and promote healing. Through discussion, hands-on activities, and creative methods like comics, digital storytelling, photovoice, poetry, and graffiti storytelling, students will critically examine approaches and ethical considerations and learn arts-based methods. Together, we?ll explore how storytelling can be a form of activist inquiry that fosters joy, builds community, and confronts systems of inequities in public health.

See the SPHHS FYS Course Guide for a complete list of section subtitles and descriptions:
https://www.umass.edu/public-health-sciences/academics/first-year-semin…