Illinois Wesleyan’s Assistant Professor of Public Health, David Remmert, brought his professional experience in public health to his Introduction to Public Health 101 students through a “windshield survey,” a procedure where public health professionals drive through a neighborhood to observe and make inferences about the health of the community.
The survey was assigned as the final project for Remmert’s class, and let students get their own hands-on experience with public health procedure.
For the survey, groups of students drove a route delineated by Remmert in the Bloomington-Normal area and made inferences about the neighborhood’s residents income, employment or education status, and how that might influence their health.
Remmert said he “wanted the route to clearly delineate for students to consider how differences in where one lives might be directly related to health outcomes.” He said that in the public health world, “we call this the social determinants of health, and research consistently points to how these things matter most to health status.”
Remmert became a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University after working at the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District and teaching at the University of Illinois where he taught a similar introductory public health course at the beginning of his career. But he did not come up with the idea for the windshield survey assignment until he discussed it with IWU nursing simulation instructors, Amanda Kemp and Stephanie Moore.
An experience with a poverty simulation, a role-playing exercise to simulate living in poverty and the difficult financial choices that many people must make, also influenced Remmert in the creation of this assignment. According to Loyola University’s health sciences website, the simulation helps to foster empathy in public health professionals and those in health sciences.
“Most of our students have no idea that less than 7% of the world’s population has a college degree,” Remmert said. “We can all benefit by seeing how others live, and my practice career reinforced that for me many times over.”
Remert said that when he reads his student’s windshield survey reports, their observations still surprise him. “I’ve had some students that noted things that I never even thought about. How schools in one part of town are all fenced in; how there are so many more bus stops on one side of town and not many at all on the other side. Or even how the sidewalks and roads are in disrepair, much more on one side of town and not so much on the other.
The natural question becomes obvious, ‘why?’”
Remmert said the intended impact of the assignment has been “ultimately, to see how the real world lives. To understand that those around us may have come from less fortunate circumstances. To empathize with people around us, and to understand better how stress interplays with health status overall.”
