Teaching Inclusive Health Promotion: A Framework for Advancing the Public Health Approach to Disability

The field of public health continues to broaden its approach toward disability beyond an emphasis on prevention to a focus on people with disabilities living healthy, productive lives. The Center for Leadership in Disability (CLD) is a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD), located in the Institute of Public Health (IPH) at Georgia State University, with the goal of improving the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families. To this end, CLD is developing a Graduate Certificate in Disability and Health composed of four graduate courses within IPH: disability and public health, disability policy, disability epidemiology, and global health and disability. The first of these was taught in the spring of 2010 and utilized Disability and Public Health (Drum, Krahn, & Bersani, 2009), published by the American Public Health Association as the foundation for introducing the intersection of the two ideas. The course was taught online and was open to all graduate students, including those outside the MPH program. This paper will present the challenges and successes of teaching the initial course, as well as the policy and epidemiology courses taught in the summer and fall. We will discuss the format of online delivery and offer suggestions for recruiting students to this niche of study within public health.