These recommendations focus on preparing faculty, staff, and learners to engage meaningfully, respectfully, and effectively with patients and communities.
6. Prepare and Support Faculty and Staff for Community-Engaged Teaching
Preparing faculty and staff for community-engaged teaching includes intentional investment in professional development. Faculty and staff benefit from cultivating the knowledge and skills needed to guide learners through complex discussions related to engaging patients and communities, as well as the social and environmental factors that influence health outcomes.
Faculty and staff serve as guides, facilitators, and institutional representatives in community-engaged learning environments. Their approaches to communication, facilitation, reflection, and partnership can shape how learners experience engagement with the community and how community partners experience engagement with the institution.
7. Prepare Learners to Engage With Complex Health and Social Challenges
Community-engaged educational experiences foster self-reflection, empathy, and critical thinking while helping learners navigate complex health and social issues in collaboration with patients and communities as partners. These partners can support learners in understanding the social and environmental factors that influence health outcomes and their roles in addressing them.
Direct engagement with patients and communities helps learners better understand lived experiences and perspectives while applying those insights through community-engaged coursework, service-learning, case-based learning, and other experiential learning opportunities.
“Some students felt overwhelmed by the scale of systemic inequities, questioning whether their efforts could make a meaningful difference. Faculty responded by emphasizing the importance of incremental change and the cumulative impact of student cohorts over time. These conversations provided important opportunities to model resilience and humility in the face of complex problems.”
— Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine faculty
8. Center Patient and Community Narratives in Learning
Patient and community narratives can enrich educational experiences by deepening learners’ understanding of health challenges, humanize health care experiences, and connect classroom learning with real-world contexts. Integrating these narratives into medical education strengthens understanding of health and the realities that shape health care experiences.
Patient and community narratives are impactful when contextualized within broader contexts, including social, environmental, and health system contexts. Authentic engagement avoids positioning community members solely as storytellers whose experiences are passively received by learners. Rather, create educational experiences that encourage respectful discussion, shared learning, and authentic exchange.