Cool Class: Difficult Dialogues in Health Communication

COOL CLASS: DIFFICULT DIALOGUES IN HEALTH COMMUNICATIONS

Tough conversations are the most meaningful in this community engagement class that offers a lifetime of takeaways.

Instructor

Sarah Parsloe, assistant professor of communication

The Scoop

At Rollins, you’ll put what you’re learning in class to work in the real world. Communication professor Sarah Parsloe encourages students in this community engagement (CE) course to address some of life’s most emotionally painful moments, including death, grief, and loss. The result is a powerful union of service learning and human connection that teaches skills in communication and social science research along with listening, validating, and empathizing.

Through hands-on experiences like making puppets to communicate with grieving children, creating digital promotions for local nonprofit New Hope for Kids, and even writing their own end-of-life directives, students learn that people don’t understand their experiences until they shape the events of their life into a plot.

“Offering people a scenario that reflects a personal experience gives them control,” says Parsloe, “turning them into a director rather than a character in their own narrative.”

Student Perspective

“From the tactile experience of making puppets for struggling kids to asking my dad really difficult questions, this course has been life-changing,” says communication major Lauren Walier ’22, an aspiring speech pathologist. “It offers so much more than a test or an exam or a paper—it’s really about life skills.”

Fun Fact

This past November, students took over the Instagram account of New Hope for Kids ahead of its celebration of Children’s Grief Awareness Day. They live-streamed the socially distanced event held near campus to memorialize loved ones and engage grieving families in their own digital puppet-making workshops.

Go behind the scenes of dozens of Rollins’ most innovative courses at rollins.college/cool-classes.

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