Course Coordinators. Dr. Anne Hicks & Alvaro R. Osornio Vargas
Credit Hours 3
Class Contact hours two 1.5 hour sessions every week
Semesters Winter
Other formal details Sessions Mondays & Wednesdays, 3:00 – 4:20 pm
Location ECHA 1-153
Purpose of the Course
Public awareness of environmental threats to the health of children is increasing. Science is needed to guide decision-making at the clinical and policy level. A multidisciplinary approach is required to reach these goals due to the complex nature of the issues. Therefore, it is the purpose of this course to provide research-oriented training in Children’s Health and the Environment (CHE) to students, ideally from multiple disciplines.
Course Description
This course will provide an introductory overview of current knowledge and challenges related to environmental influences affecting children's health. Our purpose is to build competence in identifying relationships between environmental impacts and common childhood morbidities and mortalities, child development, and early determinants of adulthood health related to costly program spending and sustainability. It will promote multidisciplinary learning better to understand CHE's many complex and relevant aspects. Understanding will be achieved by reviewing relevant literature on current CHE issues; this knowledge will form the foundation for vivid discussions around research and its implications on children’s environmental health.
Learning Objectives
Students will:
- Identify the role of the environment in health, particularly in children.
- Identify why children are particularly more vulnerable to environmental threats.
- Identify the most influential children’s windows of vulnerability.
- Identify major environmental threats and how they are measured.
- Describe the major pathways of children's exposure to environmental hazards.
- Identify current biomonitoring methods and studies and their significance.
- Describe major challenges related to the establishment of causality in CHE.
- Describe primary CHE conditions representative of exposures to environmental hazards.
- Describe known mechanisms involved in the development of those specific representative CHE conditions.
- Consider the potential influence of behavioural, social, economic, and political factors on relationships between environmental hazards and children's health.
- Identify major stakeholders related to environmental health hazards and health for children, from research to regulation, including knowledge translation and risk communication.
- Interpret relevant scientific literature
- After group work and discussion, design a study to apply basic strategies for assessing, controlling/managing, and preventing a specific health and safety hazard for children in a specific environmental setting.
- Organize collected data and information, assign tasks to each participant, prepare a paper, and
- Communicate information as addressing the general public and media.
Course Format
This interactive course will rely on active student participation. Faculty will only provide required introductory and conceptual frameworks to each topic in the syllabus addressing current examples. Faculty will engage the students in self-learning and active participation. Seminars will be used as the main activity to accomplish this. Principal coordinators will bridge between faculty to guarantee congruency and consistency of the teaching activities. In addition, during the first quarter of the course, the students will choose a research problem based on an issue of interest to be developed as a review article. The issue of interest will be presented as a letter of intent at mid-term and as a full paper at the end of the semester, followed by an oral presentation addressing a lay audience.
Student Evaluation Requirements
Graduate students who are registered for the course will be evaluated as follows. One of the two-course coordinators will complete the evaluation with the aid of other faculty members when applicable.
- Continuous evaluation – participation, group discussion, etc. (20%)
- A letter of intent (25%)
- Review article (30%)
- Presentation of the review article (25%)
The student will have the opportunity to evaluate the course and Instructor/Faculty according to the university’s practice