Thanks Karishma Swarup for this awesome post highlighting some lessons from Andy Burness's class with our center! Learn more about the class from Andy: https://lnkd.in/eDnJZbeh
Harvard MPH ‘26 | Sexuality Educator | Building @TalkYouNeverGot | ex-Dalberg | Brown
How has my favourite class so far at public health school been a communications class?! ?? ?? In my first quarter at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, I've been immersed in courses covering the nuts and bolts: - how health systems work, how societal factors like education, - how gender, race, socio-economic status determine health, and - how essential biostatistics and epidemiology are. However, my favourite class was an elective - "Practical Strategies for Health Communication." Prof. Andy Burness pushed us out of our classroom / lab / textbook-pages into into the world of news articles, video interviews, and Ted talks. A few things I learned: 1?? Stories are a magical way to make people feel ? . All the data in the world may or may not be memorable. Framing big problems in the context of real-life, lived experiences is really important to help draw people in. Write stories in a way that ellicits empathy: "they won't remember what you said but they will remember how you made them feel" 2?? Step in your opposition's shoes ?? . A conventional class assignment to write out a message deck for our cause was paired with an unconventional one - we had to also write a detailed message deck citing arguments our opposition would make. It was the first time I actually sought out writing that was coming from a viewpoint which was the complete opposite of my view. I was surprised by (a) how much logic there was behind the opposition's argument, it made me empathize with their view and (b) how much I needed to strengthen my argument to address their concerns. 3?? Stick to the message ?? . A large part of simple, clear communication is defining our key message and sticking to it. We watched videos and radio interviews of public health leaders and scientists to learn how they artfully weaved back our key message - and what some of the common pitfalls of forgetting the message can be. I wish I could distill all my learning over the 8 weeks into a single post! In the pictures: ?? the happy smiling faces of all of my classmates on our last day of class and ???? one of Prof. Andy's entertaining yet important slides - "How can I be forgettable?" ?? His words of wisdom were that the more fluffy jargon we use, the fewer people will connect with what we are talking about. We need to find ways to be more simple and direct in what we want to say. Center for Health Communication at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Sehjal Bhargava Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter Rajeshwari Subramanian Catherine Ryan