Practicing Liberatory Pedagogy in a Graduate School of Public Health

Public health curricula is shaped by accreditation requirements that largely emphasize technical and professional skills and less so community engagement. Community engagement, however, is a necessary skill for working together to disrupt the root causes of injustice that impact a community’s health. Liberatory pedagogy is an approach that can facilitate community engagement in the classroom and orient students to social justice. A team of students, staff, faculty, and community members at the University of Illinois Chicago developed the Community-Engaged Teaching Initiative with three different program components that each uniquely incorporated six principles of liberatory pedagogy: raising critical consciousness, utilizing generative themes, engaging in problem-posing, emphasizing praxis, embracing dialogue, and practicing love in the learning space. This conceptual paper details our model of liberatory pedagogy and simultaneously shows how this framework can be adapted into graduate school curricula in a multitude of ways. We conclude with considerations for educators interested in radicalizing the next generation of public health. Ultimately, our most challenging lessons arose from resisting the normative policies and practices of academia that reinforce the exclusion of community members from public health and higher education.