摘要：In 2008, the faculty of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis designed a Master of Public Health program centered on transdisciplinary problem solving in public health. We have described the rationale for our approach, guiding principles and pedagogy for the program, and specific transdisciplinary competencies students acquire. We have explained how transdisciplinary content has been organized and delivered, how the program is being evaluated, and how we have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach for a Master of Public Health degree. The argument for improving public health education through case studies and blending disciplines has been made for the past decade, 1,2 setting the stage for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education that will build workforce capacity in science and practice to solve complex public health problems. In 2008 the faculty of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis embarked on the design of a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program that would operationalize this mandate for public health education. 3 The charge to the faculty was to begin with a blank slate and be innovative yet be sure to integrate all the requirements of the Council for Public Health Education for an accredited program. The Council for Public Health Education was highly supportive of this approach to program and curriculum development from the outset. Working across disciplines to address a common challenge can take different forms. Multidisciplinary work is typically characterized by a sequential or additive combination of ideas or methods. Interdisciplinary approaches involve sharing and coordination across fields but with participants still anchored in the models and methods of their own discipline. By contrast, transdisciplinary approaches involve developing shared new frameworks that integrate and extend concepts and methods from among different disciplines, thereby transcending disciplinary boundaries. 4–6 Our focus on transdisciplinary problem solving had its roots in a broader institutional philosophy of public health. In 2008, Washington University launched a university-wide public health initiative dedicated to involving all seven schools—architecture, arts and sciences, engineering, business, law, medicine, and social work—in collaborative public health research and teaching. The integrating structure, the Institute for Public Health, appointed 165 public health scholars from across these seven schools. The Brown School, a longstanding and premier school of social work with a long history of contributions in mental health research, also committed itself to the ideal of transdisciplinary professional education in public health focused on breaking down academic silos and integrating nonacademic and nonpublic health-focused community partners into the educational model. The initial concept of the MPH program was explicitly transdisciplinary. Student recruitment materials, curricular design, community partnerships, and faculty recruitment all reflected this priority. The uptake of this idea was immediate and enthusiastic: the school recruited faculty and students who were looking for this approach to public health education and research. The public health faculty of the Brown School reviewed the latest thinking and key concepts from the literature on transdisciplinary science, 7–15 consulted with leaders of the transdisciplinary movement, and invited numerous faculty from other public health schools and programs to learn about models and challenges in providing transdisciplinary education. Especially influential in this process was the work of Daniel Stokols on transdisciplinarity, team science, and evaluation, which is captured in this recent definition of transdisciplinarity: An integrative process whereby scholars and practitioners from both academic disciplines and non-academic fields work jointly to develop and use novel conceptual and methodological approaches that synthesize and extend discipline-specific perspectives, theories, methods, and translational strategies to yield innovative solutions to particular scientific and societal problems. 16 (p6) Several central ideas emerged from the process of bringing transdisciplinary approaches into the curriculum planning process: Teaching and student work should engage the relevant communities, leaders, and organizations necessary for problem understanding and solutions. Public health education needs to encompass the entire arc from underlying science to the organizational, social, and policy challenges of interventions. Public health education should be intensely applied and problem driven, with students pushed to design and implement solutions to important real-world public health problems that draw on evidence when it is available but also are innovative and feasible. The courses should integrate team-based learning. The core innovation that resulted from this process was the creation of required transdisciplinary problem-solving courses, or, as they came to be known, TPS courses.
