From leadership research to district action: Posture, proximity, and positionality: the power of community engaged service-learning in public health leadership education

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Introduction Public health leadership is a call to action, drawing us nearer to the individuals and communities burdened by health disparities and social injustice. Reimagining public health leadership to center health equity entails collective and community engaged applied practice, premised on humility, shared power, and life-long learning. Public health education has a unique imperative to offer experiential, transformative opportunities for students to learn and practice more adaptive approaches to public health action. Methods The Community Engaged Learning Fellowships at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health support students and postdoctoral trainees to partner with organizations and implement co-designed community engaged projects. Through a cohort learning model, fellows engage in field-based projects with learning objectives centered on assuming the posture of a learner, proximity to community partners, and critical reflection around positionality and broader structural determinants of health. Qualitative data evaluating fellows’ learnings were collected. Responses from nine cohorts of fellows over 6 years (2018–2024) were analyzed thematically to reveal key insights into fellows’ overall learning experiences. Results Fellows expressed the need to enact humility, relationality, and the centering of community expertise as values that could shift power away from themselves and toward community-identified priorities and decision-making. Embodying attitudes of authenticity and flexibility was central to fellows’ perceptions of this more equitable community engaged practice, ensuring that project goals, timelines, and unanticipated challenges, for example, reflected their partners’ agendas and lived experiences. Importantly, these deferential forms of service still contributed meaningfully to fellows’ learnings. Often, instead of holding on to preconceived project expectations, fellows practiced the skill of listening to learn and trust building to identify co-creative forms of problem-solving. Discussion and implications Our findings reinforce the importance of community engaged service-learning as a pedagogical strategy in public health leadership development, one that instills values, attitudes, and skills that are premised on leaders becoming “learners.” Community engaged service-learning cultivates a practice that decenters self-interests, uplifts community expertise, values authentic relationships, and promotes more collective forms of decision-making. Ensuring these opportunities are available in graduate education can foster commitments to community partnerships premised on equity and service in future leaders.

Study methods

CEL fellowships at Harvard Chan support graduate students and postdoctoral fellows across the school and in all degree programs to implement domestic and international field-based projects through community-based, collaborative co-design and development (Table 1). The program aims to have students: (1) address community-identified needs and priorities, working in partnership with community members and partner organizations, (2) cultivate a community-centered approach to public health research and practice, including a deeper commitment to addressing structural social determinants of health, and (3) develop and strengthen reciprocal institutional relationships between Harvard Chan and community organizations in which the engaged learning projects take place. The fellowship is extracurricular (i.e., non-credit bearing) but can support practicum experiences (e.g., Applied Practice Experiences), dissertation projects, and/or other academic requirements.

Limitations

The qualitative data in our study were derived from open-ended prompts designed with the primary intention of eliciting continued critical reflection and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing around CEL fellows’ field-based experiences and, as such, served as a secondary means of evaluating student learnings within the program’s pedagogical framework. They were also deidentified and, thus, cannot speak to potential differences in experiences by, for example, department or degree program. Nonetheless, using these data allowed thematic analyses to reflect a more unstructured, inductive assessment of fellows’ learning experiences and, as such, was inclusive of themes that laid beyond our main learning objectives. Along with this qualitative approach, more recent efforts in the program have also incorporated a more formal evaluation of fellows’ learnings within the CEL framework through quantitative, survey-based measures administered online as part of program debrief. The results of this study have also begun to inform program pedagogy, including teaching materials and themes discussed during orientation and debrief. Still, it is important to note that fellows’ responses do not necessarily reflect their translating of stated learnings into practice, both during the fellowship and beyond, pointing to the need for collecting complementary forms of evaluative data, such as those from host organizations or from fellowship alumni who have graduated and now serve in public health leadership roles.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Jocelyn C. Chu; Abrania Marrero. Posture, proximity, and positionality: the power of community engaged service-learning in public health leadership education. Frontiers in Public Health (2025-07-02). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1605757

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.