Fall 2024 Course Highlight

Explore a diverse selection of Fall 2024 courses that delve into the many facets of healthy living, offering insights into nutrition, physical well-being, mental health, and overall lifestyle balance. These courses emphasize the importance of prioritizing health daily, equipping you with the knowledge and tools to make informed choices and cultivate a healthier, more balanced life.

HLTH 385-4/ENG 386-1 | Literature and Science: Sleep, Science, & Culture

Sleep is a universal human experience, yet its practice and meanings vary across human cultures, societies and ecologies. This discussion-based course will integrate scientific understandings of sleep with literary and cultural representations to explore how sleep impacts the totality of our lives, from health to society and the arts.

Moreover, while sleep is a universal human requirement, many environments pose challenges to getting sufficient sleep. Through guest lectures and readings, this course will examine how different environments, like incarceration facilities, student residence halls, low-income neighborhoods, and other areas, impact sleep. By combining sociological and biological perspectives, this course will allow students to view good sleep as a human right and understand certain physiological processes that underlie good sleep.

Taught by: Dr. Amanda Freeman & Dr. Benjamin Reiss

HLTH 385-3 | Personalizing Nutrition

What determines if a diet is optimal, or promotes a nutritional imbalance that affects health? This hands-on course will explore techniques and considerations for collecting and using dietary, anthropometric, biochemical, and clinical data to evaluate nutrition status of individuals and groups.

Taught by: Myra Woodworth-Hobbs

HLTH 385-1 | Qualitative Health Research

This course explores the non-quantitative aspects of research design, including the roles of theory, ethics, and methods that are fundamental to human health research. These techniques are essential to research with a focus on behaviors, beliefs, values, and perceptions within groups, communities, or organizations. Topics like these benefit from techniques including interviews and focus groups, the examination of lived experiences, narrative, participant observation, content analysis, discourse analysis, and naturalistic observation. When research involves living humans, it is imperative to understand the basic principles for responsible and ethical research conduct. Students will engage in interactive discussions, case studies, and practical exercises to reinforce their learning, critically reflecting on challenges and dilemmas that occur in the practice of qualitative health research. This is a fundamental course for students interested in honors’ research.

Taught by: Andrea Fitzroy

HLTH 376 | Health and Science Podcasting

Podcasting is one of the fastest-growing content channels in media today, reaching more than 183 million Americans. It's one of the most effective platforms through which to tell impactful true stories about health and science, whether one aims to work as a clinician, policymaker, journalist, educator or in any other form of science communication. In this course, students will report, produce and edit their own episode of the HealthierU podcast, pursuing topics of interest to them and to our audience. Students will learn how to research and outline their episodes, write a podcast script, record interviews and ambient sound, select and incorporate music, and edit it all together to create professional-sounding works of audio journalism. Every week, we'll listen critically to a variety of health and science podcasts to identify different podcast formats, analyze the quality of scientific information presented, and understand the techniques used to craft impactful, accurate and educational content for the ear. Guest speakers from across the Atlanta audio community provide expert tips on topics ranging from interview tips to story structure to podcast marketing.

Join us in making HealthierU!

Taught by: Maya Kroth

HLTH 381W | Health Writing and Narratives

Communicating health and science requires learning to identify new developments, conduct interviews, and craft an argument, while translating professional jargon into everyday language. You'll also learn journalism's norms and standards: speed, thoroughness, accuracy, novelty and evidentiary rigor.

Writing clearly about health and medicine is an essential skill for aspiring scientists, policymakers, science communicators, and physicians and health professionals, as well as for future journalists planning to work in any medium. Communicating health and science requires learning to identify new developments, conduct an interview, craft an argument, and organize a narrative, while translating professional jargon into everyday language. This class, taught by a professional journalist, trains you in journalism's norms and standards: speed, thoroughness, accuracy, novelty and evidentiary rigor. Students read new scientific papers and compare them to news coverage, while interrogating the storytelling strategies of different journalistic genres. Guest speakers include text journalists working in short and long forms, audio and video creators, data specialists and interview strategists. Assignments include writing short and long pieces in a range of genres; completed work may be published in the CSHH online journal, Exploring Health. (Application and permission of instructor; no prerequisites.)

Taught by: Maryn McKenna