Progressive tetrad
Rhetoric (4 of 4)
Posted to LinkedIn on 2026-07-20. The text below is the post as published.
The post linked to https://meharry.edu/meet-meharry/mission-and-vision/.
A practitioner, a researcher, and an advocate find themselves in a regression class. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; I hadn’t.
So. Why should busy, professional students take a data-oriented course? Because learners in the Meharry Medical College School of Global Health (SGH) regularly read data-based claims in the literature. They engage them in policy arguments. And they encounter them in the algorithmic systems and agentic technologies embedded in public health practice.
SGH learners are practitioners who want to see data as evidence for what they already witness. They are researchers who want to see data as authority in contested interpretive spaces. And they are advocates who want to see data as material for a narrative that moves people.
SGH learners should use data critically to notice, frame, and discern. This is how they come to know through data.
When they encounter a data-based claim, first they notice: observe without evaluating, check predispositions, name what is familiar and unfamiliar, and resist premature meaning-making. Next they frame: name the analytic move and type of comparison, orient toward sense-making, but stop short of conclusion. Finally, they discern: make sense of the result given what was noticed and how it was framed. They grasp the point when they draw a conclusion; they assert the point when they evaluate a claim. This is how they become known.
SGH learners should use data responsibly to tend, stand, and speak. This is how they come to relate through data.
They tend to data throughout their life cycle, from posing good questions to preserving methods and results for transparency. They stand behind their work and with the persons represented in the data. They address bias, seek fairness and equity, protect privacy, and honor sovereignty. They speak for and with the communities that the data represent. This is how they become related-to.
“Progressive” looks like a rhetoric of data for health equity when data methods serve these capacities. When students have an identity and a stake, epistemic discipline, and relational accountability. When they already stand inside the inequities the data should illuminate.
The hope I feel now is the same hope I always felt with learners. Now I claim it more fully. More directively. The spiral is widening.
[This is the fourth of a series of 4 LinkedIn posts.]