Teaching Historical Approaches to Public Health Educators: Lessons Learned From an Interprofessional Workshop

This article describes a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Institute “Disease, Pandemics, and Public Health in the United States” held in the summer of 2023 on the campus of The Ohio State University. It discusses how the institute was developed, its content, and its pedagogical impact. This institute offered training in how to integrate a historical perspective into public health pedagogy for 30 instructors of varied rank from a range of academic institutions. More importantly, the institute established a long-lasting pedagogical community that continues to foster innovation in public health pedagogy long after the completion of the formal program. While the institute focused on pandemics in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in this article we argue that this institute provides a powerful roadmap for meaningful interdisciplinary training that enables public health educators to effectively integrate historical methods, perspectives, and knowledge into their pedagogy in response to growing calls for greater historicization of contemporary threats to public health.