ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
Open Access
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Abstract Students learn better when they are engaged with real-world problems. This approach is especially eective for topics of environmental health, where students have limited exposure to fieldwork during their period of study. Hence, it is important to shift from conventional instruction-based methods to innovative pedagogical approaches. Problem- based and community-based learning oer academia the tools to prepare students via the development of essential problem-solving and analytical skills. Problem-based learning enables students to identify environmental health issues and develop feasible, realistic solutions to community problems. Furthermore, community-based learning allows students to learn through community engagement and generate solutions to real environmental health issues that communities face. This study employed a qualitative approach to explore the experience of two cohorts of environmental health students regarding problem-based and community-based approaches. This study found that the students benefited from the respective approaches and gained valuable communication, leadership, problem-solving, and analytical skills that are crucial in the environmental health field. Keywords: environmental health, problem-based learning, community- based learning, environmental education Preparing Future Environmental Health Practitioners Through Problem-Based and Community- Based Approaches: Experiences of Environmental Health Students
Melishnee Ruthanam, MHSc Durban University of Technology
use innovative and interactive methods to enhance learning. In a South African study, Iputo and Kwizera (2005) found that aca- demic performance increased with PBL or community-based learning (CBL; also called community-engaged learning) when com- pared with lecture-based curriculum. A gap in the literature exists, however, pertaining to environmental health studies and teaching methods in academia. This study will contribute to our under- standing of the experiences of environmen- tal health students regarding pedagogical approaches that dier from the conventional lecture-based method. This article shares insights from two cohorts of environmental health students (third- and fourth-years). A focus group was conducted with participants from each cohort to understand their experi- ences. Study findings are presented accord- ing to the themes generated from the analysis of responses, with the final section providing commonalities across both cohorts. The first section of this article presents a conceptual framework for PBL and CBL, including a literature review. Next, themes generated from the findings are presented. The findings allow for an evaluation of environmental health teaching methods as perceived by the student and can be used to inform the selection of pedagogies that encourage student engagement with envi- ronmental health content to generate crucial skills for future professionals. Literature Review The role of education is to develop indi- viduals who are active, engaged, and able
Introduction The world is continuously and rapidly evolv- ing. The cohort of students currently study- ing at universities diers significantly from students of past decades. Likewise, pedagogi- cal approaches should also evolve into meth- ods that engage current students and cater to diverse learning styles. When conven- tional teaching methods are used, students
report a lack of engagement, even boredom (Özerk, 2020). Adopting interactive methods of teaching, such as problem-based learning (PBL) or project-based learning approaches, can address this problem. Lecture-based teaching is the most common method used across universities (Govender, 2016; Maphosa & Kalenga, 2012; McCullough & Munro, 2016), but some lecturers also
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Volume 87 • Number 9
https://doi.org/10.70387/001c.137194
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