Community Based Participatory Research Student Field Placements

Issues: Increasingly, public health higher education is providing students with hands-on CBPR experience through student field placements. Students’ critical reflections about field placement experiences can serve a dual purpose:  helping students to consider process factors central to CBPR and helping partners identify new perspectives on CBPR “lessons learned.”

Description: Growing Healthy Soil for Healthy Communities (GHSHC) is a collaboration between the Medical College of Wisconsin, Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers (SSCHC), Walnut Way Conservation Corps (WWCC), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that is exploring soil lead concentrations in backyard gardens in two Milwaukee, Wisconsin neighborhoods. This presentation describes lessons learned from a graduate student field placement with GHSHC. It employs constructs from Wallerstein et al’s CBPR Conceptual Logic Model (2008) to frame and discuss field placement reflections.

Lessons Learned: Group dynamics emerged as the most challenging and rewarding aspect of the field placement process, leading to critical student reflection on student flexibility, relationship building, the evolution of partnership trust, and power dynamics related to length of time in a partnership and student status.

Recommendations: Service-learning through participatory research highlights the importance of critical reflection before, during and after service-learning experiences and student field placements should similarly encourage continuous student reflection. Introduction of formalized models that identify process and outcome considerations can aid in the reflection process and provide a unified agenda for shared discussion and reflection among students and CBPR partners.