Abstract :
[en] Background - One Health education increasingly calls for systems thinking, yet the term often carries broad ambition without clear guidance for educational design. In many teaching settings, systems thinking is presented as a topic to introduce or a mindset to encourage, while the learning conditions that help learners express it in visible, discussable ways remain fuzzy. A stronger educational foundation requires a clearer account of what should be designed into the learning environment so that learners can make system relations, constraints, responsibilities, and consequences explicit in collective work.
Methods - The framework was developed through a comparative interpretive synthesis of six educational studies examining serious games, simulations, and structured group activities in public health-related training. Cross-case analysis focused on how activity design and debrief conditions shaped the public expression of systems-oriented explanation, justification, and responsibility in recorded group discussion.
Results - Together these studies suggest a conceptual framework for designing systems thinking in One Health education as a form of publicly articulated reasoning. In this framing, systems thinking becomes visible when learners must explain how actions unfold across time, justify decisions under constraint, and connect immediate choices to wider effects in front of others. The central educational task is to create conditions that support this kind of explanation in a structured and inspectable form.
The framework defines five linked design conditions. Shared representations provide a common reference point, such as a map, board state, timeline, or written trace, that allows participants to examine relations, follow change, and test claims against visible evidence. Visible constraints, including time pressure, limited resources, partial information, and competing priorities, make trade-offs explicit and give decisions practical consequence. Organised responsibilities clarify who is expected to notice, decide, justify, and respond, making interdependence and accountability part of the learning situation. Reflection prompts focused on sequence, reasons, and expected consequences support explanation of persistence, delay, accumulation, and changing options over time. Implementation fit addresses whether these supports remain usable in routine teaching conditions, including clarity, visibility, audibility, and ease of use.
Conclusions - Together, these conditions define a configuration for learning environments that can support systems-oriented explanation in multidisciplinary settings. Serious games, simulations, mapping tasks, and other structured collaborative activities become educationally valuable when they help learners make their reasoning explicit through shared evidence, defined responsibilities, and time-linked consequences. The framework offers a basis for the design, study, and evaluation of One Health teaching activities by specifying the pedagogic conditions under which systems thinking becomes observable in group learning. It also supports clearer reporting of educational design, making it easier to judge when learners are being asked to engage with complexity in ways that are concrete, accountable, and open to collective scrutiny.
