The objectives for a shared assignment across both classes were to:
- Examine the impact of religious diversity on maternal and infant health.
- Identify ways prenatal relationship building around religious diversity can improve health outcomes.
- Identify religious factors that could impact maternal and infant health equity.
Working in groups that included students from each class, students had to: Without specifically requesting the patient’s religion, write down what five questions a provider (OB/GYN or midwife specifically) could ask to better understand how religious practices could impact prenatal care, birth, and infant health.
Completing the assignment required students to use the content knowledge from their respective courses in a practical way to consider the experiences of individuals and families in healthcare interactions. Rather than focus on “religious literacy” to measure what students (or providers) know, we considered competency and understanding based on the questions providers asked.
Religious identity, faith and practice, tailored to individual patient experiences
Centering this assignment around critical question development allowed us and our students to move away from a comprehensive knowledge of religion, which flattens internal religious diversity and too often presents religions as ahistorical and static beliefs, to an assumption of religious identity, faith and practice being tailored to individual patient experiences, a recognition of how typical it is for spiritual identity, belief, and practice to be incongruent or situated in complex debates about orthodoxy and orthopraxy. This moves toward considering cultural humility in healthcare and public health interaction and improves the conversation between patients and caregivers.
This collaboration was timely. In 2022, The March of Dimes found that one-third of Iowa’s 99 counties were maternity care deserts, lacking access to obstetric care. This 14% of pregnant people in Iowa without a birthing hospital need to drive more than 30 minutes for care. In the year of the study, 4,176 babies were born in one of Iowa’s maternity care deserts, approximately eleven percent of all births in the state. Since many Iowa parents need to drive farther to receive care, each appointment is essential to ensure better health outcomes.
As the assignment wrapped up, we received feedback from students.
Many appreciated learning about a new content area. It was also clear that we pushed students into a space where they weren’t entirely comfortable: instead of allowing them to show off how much they knew, we challenged them to put their knowledge into practice. That was unexplored territory for many of them. We consider that a win. And we’ll do it again next year.
Disa Cornish, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor, Public Health and Cara Burnidge is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Northern Iowa.
