PhD Position community engaged education in Global Health

The social issues related to health and wellbeing that we face today are becoming increasingly complex and in order to respond to these developments, education needs to be adjusted to prepare students for working in this context. In addition to professional knowledge, it is important that students also understand the complexity of social issues both locally and globally and possess the competences to make a relevant contribution to them. Society can provide a rich learning environment for this as societal challenges are integrated into the educational curriculum. Students can integrate insights from various disciplines and work in collaboration with societal partners to address complex societal challenges on a local, national or global scale. This is also in line with the ambition of VU Amsterdam of fostering research and education that contributes to societal issues both locally and globally.
This PhD position involves research on the design, implementation and evaluation of community engaged education in global health for students in higher education, and to find answers to questions like how this type of education can be best realized, what competences students need to effectively work with societal partners on complex global challenges, how to scaffold such competences across courses, what support teachers need in implementing this type of education, and how to design tools and methods to assess achievements in different contexts. The research includes a pilot project in the field of Global Health in which students work on global health challenges together with societal partners. It is our ambition that results from this pilot project will be implemented in various existing and new higher education programs, and contribute to building education theory on this topic.

Your duties

As a PhD student your main tasks and responsibilities are:

• to work in close collaboration with the community service learning (CSL) team, and students, teachers and community partners
• to carry out literature study, surveys, interviews, and focus groups with stakeholders to understand development of transdisciplinary programmes
• to develop new ideas and insights that will lead to international publications and a PhD thesis
• to assist in teaching activities of the department (50%)
• Your work will be supported with committed supervision and additional training in methods you are not familiar with. If you share our enthusiasm for the academic challenges and relevance of the proposed research topic and meet the requirements below, then we encourage you to apply for the position.