healthcare change in the Sayre neighborhood.
The Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Center at Sayre is connected to a small
learning community (SLC) which involves 350 students from grades 6 through 8. In that SLC,
health promotion activities are integrated with core subject learning in science, social studies,
math, language arts, etc. Ultimately, every curriculum unit will have a community education
and/or community problem-solving component (usually this will function as the organizing
theme of the unit). Given this approach, Sayre students are not passive recipients of health
information. Instead, they are active deliverers of information and coordination and creative
providers of service.
A considerable number and variety of Penn academically-based community service
courses provide the resources and support that make it possible to operate, sustain, and develop
the Sayre Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Center. Literally hundreds of Penn students
(professional, graduate and undergraduate) and dozens of faculty members, from a wide range of
Penn schools and departments, work at Sayre. Since they are performing community service
while engaged in academic research, teaching and learning, they are simultaneously practicing
their specialized skills and developing, to some extent at least, their moral and civic
consciousness and democratic character. And since they are engaged in a highly integrated
common project, they are also learning how to communicate, interact, and collaborate with each
other in wholly unprecedented ways that have measurably broadened their academic horizons
and demonstrated to them the real value of working to overcome disciplinary ethnocentrism,
tribalism and guildism. Successful concrete real world problem-solving actions speak louder and
more convincingly than abstract exhortation.
The Dean of Penn Medicine, Arthur Rubenstein, recognized the extraordinary potential of
the Sayre Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Project when he appointed Bernett L.
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Convention