Ann-Marie Sylvia Provides Lessons in "Teaching Across Silos"
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SPHHS lecturer Ann-Marie Sylvia's innovative course design is featured in a new post from the UMass Amherst Instructional Design, Engagement, and Support (IDEAS) team.
In a post titled "Teaching Across Silos: Real-World Lessons from a Public Health × Marketing Classroom," Sylvia's work piloting a public health communications course in tandem with a marketing class led by Cynthia Barstow from the Isenberg School of Management is analyzed. The course design helped to bring students from different disciplines together to solve real-world problems—and the results transform both student learning and the teaching experience.
Sylvia, who completed a PhD in Kinesiology and an MPH in Epidemiology at UMass Amherst in the Spring of 2025, writes that she realized while teaching Public Health Communications as a graduate student that "public health students are not trained in graphic design or social media marketing, which meant that I could teach them the theories of health media design, but in practice, advertising agencies are usually hired to design messaging that can amplify a campaigns' public health impact. I knew that, in addition to teaching theory, it would be beneficial for the students to gain the real-world experience of working with an advertising agency to develop a media campaign that reflects a real-world experience."
That's where her partnership with Barstow came in. By co-developing a collaborative project between Sylvia's public health communication class and Barstow's marketing class, each of the public health teams could be matched with a marketing team acting as an “advertising agency.”
"Importantly, the student outcomes of this collaboration not only provide real-world experience but also allow both public health and marketing students to add a tangible product on their resumes," writes Sylvia. "This is a door-opener—it gives students an opportunity to stand out during the job search by talking about building an actual public health marketing campaign that was implemented on the campus of Massachusetts’ flagship public university."
Featuring
Ann-Marie Sylvia
