Progressive tetrad
Emergence (3 of 4)
Posted to LinkedIn on 2026-07-13. The text below is the post as published.
The post linked to https://meharry.edu/meet-meharry/mission-and-vision/.
When I fell out of love with CDC, I held on to hope that centers learners. When I inverted the word “regressive”, I aspired to a progressive culture. When I felt unheard, I registered durable, constructive protest on behalf of learners. When my hope ran underneath the frustration, hurt, and disappointment, I continued to believe in learners. Because learners believe.
I now center learners at Meharry Medical College School of Global Health (Meharry School of Global Health).
This spring, I was privileged to lead a course on statistical regression and health equity. In the opening weeks, my students rated themselves lowest in precisely the skills the course leaned on hardest — regression, inference, statistical coding. Some of my students had never run statistical software; others had written code for years. They countered their own modest estimate of their quantitative skill with a large appetite to build the skill anyway.
They did not treat health equity as an abstraction. To a person, they arrived already carrying a reason. They traversed the short distance between their own lives and the subject on the syllabus. Many of them started out uncomfortable critically reading quantitative claims about health equity. They learned how to encounter and engage those claims by asking more questions: Whose interests? What stakes? What context? What does rigor demand?
By semester’s end, I watched them read, critique, and present data-based arguments that they had once found opaque. I saw them locate meaning in the data not from logistic, loglinear, or hazard regression but from lived experiences that those models meant to measure. They worked through the technical machinery to peer into the intersections of maternal and mental morbidity; Covid and class; mpox, gender, and sex. They uncovered the consequences for communities that have historically been subjects of study rather than agents of it.
I changed too. When I started the semester, I centered the methods rather than centering the students. Why should busy, professional students take a data-oriented course? I turned that question and my semester’s experience into a rhetoric of data for health equity. An ethic emerged for meeting students where they are so that they can encounter data critically and responsibly. So that, with Meharry, they can empower diverse populations to improve the well-being of humankind.
[This is the third of a series of 4 LinkedIn posts.]