Debates, tensions, and alternatives in health promotion education from south-north and south-south cooperation: The health promotion and social development master experience

Abstract

This chapter covers the experience of the iPROMS, Master's Degree in Health Promotion and Social Development, as well as the learnings gathered from its implementation, offered since 2013 and provided in Spanish in an online platform by ISPED at the Universite de Bordeaux, France, and the Faculty of Health Sciences at the UPNA, Spain. This experience was shaped as a triangular prism involving faculty members from the UPNA, the ISPED, and Latin America. The co-production of this chapter took place within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a social and health emergency with global and differential impacts aggravating pre-existing structural inequalities, an integrated and critical approach intended to break with the northern hemisphere hegemony in the field of public health and health promotion. We also understand the importance of interdisciplinary, intercultural lenses and seek to integrate diverse professional voices and trajectories, resulting in a perspective that reflects the complexity of the health promotion field. The first section describes the main features of the processes that shaped the Masters experience. The second section explains the key components of the pedagogical proposal, in particular the challenge of pursuing an academic relationship integrating the experience of the Southern hemisphere, avoiding hegemonic positions and based on mutual respect and creative dialogue. The last section introduces some of the lessons learned as well as pending challenges and opportunities for scaling up the experience in alternative scenarios. Within the last section, the following aspects were highlighted according to their pedagogical relevance: academic training (academic oriented) vs. professional training (practice oriented), questioning hegemonic approaches and confronting teaching models, learning achievements, and, finally, thinking in terms of community.