Exploring Social Justice in
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS AND MEDICINE

Al-Wassia, R., Hamed, O., Al-Wassia, H., Alafari, R., & Jamjoom, R. (2015). Cultural challenges to implementation of formative assessment in Saudi Arabia: An exploratory study. Medical Teacher, 37, S9–S19.

This study investigates the challenges students and faculty face when attempting to implement formative assessment methods for learning. Looking at the activities, capabilities, enablers, and indicators that could impact individual performance, this cross-sectional, exploratory study highlights the need for (a) initial teacher training and standards for teacher certification; (b) providing teachers already in the work-force the opportunities to participate in professional development programs that provide resources on how to incorporate formative assessment in their regular practice; and (c) long-term policies that monitor a range of process and outcome indicators to better understand performance.

Bergen, M., & Mollen, D. (2019). Teaching Sizeism: Integrating Size into Multicultural Education and Clinical Training. Women & Therapy, 42(1/2), 164–180.

This article offers a compelling argument for the need to incorporate issues around body size in multicultural curricula and clinical training of practitioner psychologists and therapists. While multicultural education has traditionally focused on issues of race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and age, conversations around size have been notably absent. That is, despite the interconnections between size and race, gender, class, and so on. Moreover, issues around obesity have been largely framed through a medicalized and individualized perspective, which centres on weight management, dieting and exercise. Data has shown that these approaches are largely ineffective and non-maintainable. In tackling the myths perpetuated in the name of ‘healthism’, such as the notion that weight loss is necessarily good for one’s health, the authors identify seven strategies and suggestions to consider when creating and conducting sizeism workshops for students, trainees, professionals and community members.

Calzo, J. P., Katz-Wise, S. L., Charlton, B. M., Gordon, A. R., & Krieger, N. (2019). Addressing the dearth of critical gender analysis in public health and medical pedagogy: an interdisciplinary seminar to generate student-created teaching examples. Critical Public Health, 29(1), 18–26.

This article offers a systematic examination of how population health is shaped by systems of gender relations. Drawing from ongoing public debates around reproductive healthcare access and transgender rights, the authors explore the complexities of how sex and gender relate to health equity. Generally, the authors maintain that courses in critical gender-based public health analysis are rare despite growing interests among graduate level learners, researchers, educators, and medical practitioners. Yet while the provision of a formal course would help to address these gaps, there is a scarcity of faculty with the necessary expertise, institutional resistance, and fiscal know-how to bring such a curriculum to fruition. In their attempt to address these issues, the authors designed a capstone course in Women, Gender and Health that would enable students to develop their teaching skills in gender-based analysis. This article examines the experiences and outcomes of this course development.