Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF)

Transformative Health Justice Training for Interprofessional Learners

This initiative will equip students in all healthcare fields to become effective agents for dismantling health inequities and medical racism, in an environment that fosters both reckoning and healing. The project will develop and evaluate a novel immersive, interdisciplinary, interprofessional health justice curriculum that uses art, history, storytelling, dialogic skill-building, and the University of Michigan's important tie to Alabama artist and advocate Michelle Browder to create an educational experience that shifts learners' ways of being, knowing, and doing — helping learners move beyond conventional "cultural competency" training toward deeper reflection, humility, solidarity, and action.

The centerpiece of the project is a five-day immersive experience at Michelle Browder's Teaching Campus in Alabama, a site connected to the histories of Black civil rights, medical racism, and environmental injustice, and connected to UM through an iconic painting in UM’s collection. This immersive experience is preceded by a novel 30-hour virtual curriculum on race, racism, health equity, and structural determinants of health.

The initial cohort of interprofessional learners will be directly transformed by the curriculum and experience. Additional expected outcomes include a new interdisciplinary, interprofessional health justice and antiracism curriculum for healthcare learners in all fields; qualitative and quantitative evaluation data measuring the curriculum's impact on participants' ways of being, knowing, and doing, including validated measures of bias, discrimination, racism, racial trauma, and racial healing; a new toolkit for examining the history of race and racism in U.S. health professions schools and hospitals; and a blueprint for a sustainable model for this teaching approach going forward.