You’ve probably heard of Community Service Learning (CSL) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but what does it really mean when students explore real social issues as part of their studies? And could that kind of hands-on approach work in your teaching too? In this series, we zoom in on existing CSL examples at VU. Learn more about how CSL works in different fields and how it might fit with the way you teach.
Global health problems rarely stay inside one discipline. A disease outbreak is a medical issue, but also a policy issue, an economic issue, sometimes a spatial one. Research Methods in Global Health takes that complexity as its starting point, teaching students to look at disease burden through more than one academic lens while they build the research skills to actually do something with what they find.
Students learn study design and both qualitative and quantitative methods, then apply them right away. Working with real organisations, from NGOs to research institutes to patient advocacy groups in the Netherlands, Ghana and India, each student takes on a live topic and works it into an Expression of Interest: a document their partner can use to pursue funding and shape a project statement.
Three of this period's partners
NLR (No Leprosy Remains) NLR built a self-assessment tool, the NTD Inclusion Score Card, that helps organisations involve people affected by neglected tropical diseases in their own decision-making. It's been piloted, and national health programmes are now curious about adapting it for government use. Students will dig into what a next version, possibly a government one, would need.
Endometriose Stichting Endometriosis affects about one in ten people assigned female at birth, but stays underfunded and misunderstood, and Dutch patients wait 7 to 10 years on average for a diagnosis. Students will trace the obstacles patients encounter when trying to access the care system, and explore the care needs of the patient community through stakeholder engagement.
The Banyan (India) The Banyan works with people facing serious mental health conditions, many with histories of homelessness, in India. Students take on the ethics of doing research in that context: consent, capacity, what real benefit to participants even looks like. It's the kind of population research usually leaves out.
How the research turns into something real
Each student pairs an organisational contact with an academic topic expert at the Athena Institute, combining an unsystematic literature search with stakeholder interviews. The result isn't just an academic paper. It's a proposal the partner organisation can bring into real funding conversations, and it sets up the following course, Global Health Interventions, where the same topic gets developed further.
The course is just getting started
The course is just kicking off, so there are no finished projects or quotes yet. We'll update this page with student and partner voices, and a look at what the Expressions of Interest led to, once the course wraps up.
