INCORPORATING ANTI-OPPRESSIVE PRINCIPLES INTO PUBLIC HEALTH PEDAGOGY – A QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

Introduction: Public health students are not systematically trained self-awareness of how positionality and power impact public health practice. A grounding in anti-oppression equips future practitioners with tools to recognize the impact of present and historical contexts, foster critical self-reflection, and address systems of oppression. Three aims guided this research: 1) summarize definitions of anti-oppression in peer-reviewed literature; 2) identity how faculty operationalize and apply anti-oppressive principles to public health education; and 3) identity how faculty apply anti-oppressive principles to public health research and practice. The goal of this research was to gather evidence of how anti-oppression is incorporated in public health teaching and research to inform future operationalization of anti-oppression for public health pedagogical practice. Methods: For Aim 1, a scoping review was conducted across seven databases. For Aims 2 and 3, purposive sampling was used to identify public health faculty across schools of public health espousing an explicit commitment to social justice within mission and vision statements. Snowball sampling and word-of-mouth approaches were also employed. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted between January and April 2020 via Zoom; analyses were informed by Constructivist Grounded Theory and conducted using open coding. Results: The scoping review identified 39 unique definitions of anti-oppression of which practice, power, oppression, structures, and systems were core values. Twenty-six faculty from nine schools of public health and one school of medicine participated and highlighted ways in which to engage in anti-oppressive teaching and research while acknowledging challenges in doing so and shared institutional supports and barriers to anti-oppressive practice. Conclusions: Anti-oppression is an explicit framework that can be incorporated in training future public health practitioners to work towards dismantling systems of oppression through addressing issues of power and privilege. Findings from this study indicate that for anti-oppression to be incorporated into public health pedagogy and research, there must be: 1) a consistent and needs-based training of faculty on anti-oppressive practice and 2) a commitment from schools of public health to support an environment that will foster anti-oppressive values which includes but is not limited to offering a network of resources, funding, and administrative support for faculty