Abstract / Summary
Abstract Background : Complex global health challenges require educational approaches that enable learners to engage with uncertainty, multiple interacting determinants and different health system levels. Challenge-based learning offers a structured approach, yet less is known about how learners experience the translation of such challenges into structured learning formats and what pedagogical tensions may emerge in this process. This study explored how learners experienced and perceived working through a complex global health challenge within a design-thinking-inspired challenge-based learning format and sought to identify and interpret broader pedagogical tensions arising from this process. Methods : We conducted a qualitative exploratory study based on anonymous survey responses following a three-hour workshop within an interdisciplinary Global Health Spring School at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany in 2026. The workshop engaged 31 students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in a fictional primary health care case set in a resource-limited context. A workshop-specific survey comprising five open-ended questions was completed by 12 participants. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis with combined deductive–inductive category development. Results: Qualitative analysis generated four main categories relating to complexity, didactic methods, interdisciplinarity and authenticity. Participants described the workshop as providing a useful structure for engaging with complexity while broadening their perspectives beyond disease-specific and biomedical framings to include system-level and interdisciplinary dimensions. At the same time, they highlighted limited analytical depth, difficulties in seeking solutions to open-ended problems, and concerns that systems-oriented and fictionalised problem-solving could distance learning from the individual patient and the lived context of the challenge. Conclusions : Challenge-based learning can provide a valuable approach for engaging learners with complex global health challenges, but its educational value may depend on how recurring pedagogical tensions are navigated. Our findings point to tensions related to scaffolding, interdisciplinarity, uncertainty, perspective shifting, and contextualisation. Methodological grounding, shared analytical frameworks, reflective facilitation, longitudinal curricular embedding, and closer engagement with real-world contexts and stakeholders may support the productive navigation of these challenge-based teaching formats.