Teaching with Movement: Using the Health Privilege Activity to Physically Demonstrate Disparities in Society

Summary: This article describes and evaluates an activity designed to demonstrate how biological factors (e.g., genetics), individual-level behaviors (e.g., smoking), and social factors (e.g., socioeconomic status) shape health status and access to health care. Active learning techniques were utilized to introduce the sociological imagination as it pertains to health, as well as to physically demonstrate stratification processes. A pretest-posttest design was implemented to evaluate the activity's impact on student learning outcomes (N = 305). Analysis suggests that after the activity students regarded society as important for influencing health, including a shift in responsibility for one's health away from the individual, and that students gained a greater understanding of the importance of social class in shaping health. In open-ended responses, students indicated that the physicality of the approach provided further clarity of abstract concepts. Implications of these findings and broader directions for advancing students' understanding of disparities related to health are discussed.