Undergraduate Environmental Public Health Education

Environmental, occupational, and public health in the United States are practiced across a fragmented system that makes work across those areas more difficult. A large proportion of currently active environmental and occupational health professionals, advocates, policy makers, and activists are nearing retirement age, while some of our major health challenges are heavily influenced by aspects of environment. Concurrently, programs that educate undergraduate college students in environmental health are faced with multiple, often competing demands which can impede progressive movement toward dynamic curricula for the needs of the twenty-first century. We describe our use of developmental evaluation to negotiate these challenges in our specific undergraduate education program, with the dual aims of drawing attention to developmental evaluation as a useful tool for people involved in environmental and occupational health advocacy, policy-making, activism, research, or education for change, as well as to promote discussion about how best to educate the next generation of environmental public health students.