As a dedicated team of Physiotherapy academics based in Glasgow, a city fraught with high levels of deprivation and the lowest average life expectancy in Europe, we are committed to improving the health of the populations that we serve through the provision of high quality, authentic education for our students. Our envisioned service-learning approach allowed us to embrace and champion GCU’s Common Good mission, accenting in particular the organisational goals of ‘transformative learning’ and ‘pioneering partnerships’.
As ‘Agents for the Common Good’ we transformed the learning experiences for our Physiotherapy students, developing them as health promotion agents of change, active across Greater Glasgow in ‘hard to reach’ communities, reducing health inequalities. To achieve this, we designed a unique four-way collaboration that includes community partners, health service users, our students and our academic teaching team.
We collaborated with our students, diverse community partners and their service users to:
- Identify ‘hard to reach’/ ‘easy to ignore’ populations and their health promotion needs, as expressed by service users
- Visit and liaise with 140+ community partner sites, 50+ community staff and volunteers, and 300+ service users.
- Co-design 40+ websites, leaflets, infographics and YouTube videos
- Deliver 42 Health Promotion workshops
- Impact upon the health of 1000s of services users in Greater Glasgow
- Create impactful, authentic, sustainable learning experiences to develop students’ transversal skills
- Empower students to co-create and co-own their learning in diverse community based settings
- Disseminate findings at national and international conferences and in publications
Our unique collaboration cuts across thematic priorities and delivers numerous outputs/outcomes associated with students as partners, technology enhanced learning, education for sustainable development, intercultural learning and employability. Additionally, we integrated issues such as race, class and economic inequality into our teaching in a real and meaningful way, increasing students’ ability to interpret social justice issues in the course of their future professional career.
This collaborative experience over the past five years has advanced all partners in their development as learners, teachers and health promotion agents. Our transformative partnerships have metamorphosed beyond instrumental commitments towards empowering experiences for all partners by ensuring their social and ecological wellbeing now and into the future.