In this final weekly blog, I will be making reflections on the learning that occurred throughout the five weeks.

Participatory Approaches

With the various case studies provided each week, I can see that participatory approach to teaching health education involve more than one sector of the Victorian curriculum.

Some of the implications from participatory approaches are:

• Students’ level of participation as shown by Hart’s ladder
• Student voice, which relates to student participation, encourages educators to empower students’ participation
• The IVAC (Investigation, vision, action, change) model taps into the general steps in enforcing a student agency centred approach in teaching and learning
• Social influences and factors are the primary elements at play, therefore, educators need to create suitable social environment for their students

Also, participatory approaches connect cross-curriculum objectives into teaching, not just health and physical education.

This means that participatory approach is not just going to be a teaching practice for teaching health, while teaching all sorts of subjects, I can integrate participatory approach.

As Simovska (2006) address in the chapter “‘Young minds’: children’s and young people’s voices in health matters – learning by making a difference”, health-promoting schools framework, participation approach, student agency and voice all contribute to allow and enable student participate – the notion where empowerment and being part of the discussion is.

What participation approach brings to me at the end of the day, is a whole new outlook on how lessons are supposed to be taught, because when I think of my learning in primary and secondary schools, I see the big differences. But also, I am aware of the difficulties and practicalities in embedding every lesson with some sort of participatory approach.

 

Reference

Simovska, V. (2006).  “Young Minds”: children’s and young people’s voices in health matters – learning by making a difference, in Addressing the socioeconomic determinants of healthy eating habits and physical activity levels among adolescents / WHO/HBSC FORUM,  pp. 105-116, retrieved from http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/98231/e89375.pdf

For this week, the topic is about sexuality and digital media in relation to health education.

Some problems relating to the topic that are highlighted in Albury’s article (2013) are online pornography, sexting and online relationship etiquette. A point she made was:

• Schools were “wary of drawing negative attention from parents and the broader community, and chose to avoid ‘controversy’ wherever possible.”

It shows there is an inadequate level of training and development for the teachers in question. The author also agreed by explaining the exact situation with the quote “that a lack of pre-service and/or in-service training in both sexuality and media studies encouraged many teachers to err on the side of caution in their teaching.”

On the contrary, nowadays students might have more exposure and familiarities than old teachers. Therefore, different from back then, schools and teachers will need to be sufficiently prepared for teaching students about sexuality and digital media.

The activity of taking a selfie that would most likely enable others to identify you was performed during class.

Some interesting ideas for this activity were:

• The emotional changes in me when I took the selfie
• What if I did not use my phone’s camera to take this photo
• Will change in angles and background affect myself

The VCE study design of health and human development have four units of study, and the first two, understanding health and wellbeing and managing health and development both relate to the implications the selfie activity have.

For instance, not just the social and cultural factors and contexts matter, students with other influences such as religion have different reactions with taking selfies.

This shows to implement a unit of work involving the selfie activity, as educators, we need to reconsider students’ capabilities of social and online wellbeing.

Aubury et al’s article on sexting where sexting was viewed as exclusively the exchange of images that are sexual. This alerts me as an educator about the way we work with media. Obviously, not all news and information from mass media are forged and have incorrect knowledge. To work with it, we as educators should always keep the five propositions for health and physical education curriculum in mind and work for empowering students to make informed choices on those troublesome media devices.

 

 

Reference

Albury, K. (2013).  Young people, media and sexual learning: rethinking representation, Sex Education, 13:sup1, S32-S44, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2013.767194

Albury, K., Hasinoff, A., Senft, T. (2016) ‘From Media Abstinence to Media Production: Sexting, Young People and Education’, in L. Allen and M. Rasmussen, eds The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, Place: Palgrave. 527-545.

In regard to this week’s learning, we had been discussing the idea of youth voice.

The three participatory approaches brainstormed during class are as follows:

• Connect to real world and make relation to the students

This is a broad idea and probably on the “young people are consulted and informed” level of participation in Hart’s ladder

• Invite student agency

“Young people lead and initiate action” or “adult-initiated, shared decisions with young people” in Hart’s ladder

• Empowerment for students to make changes that they believe

“Young people lead and initiate action” or “young people ad adults share decision-making” on hart’s ladder.

With reference to Simovska’s article, both of the pupil council’s goals are relatable and achievable.

It corresponds to the aforementioned participatory approaches, as well as making a point that we need to do more than transmission of knowledge.

It was mentioned in class that, “the best health education is not delivered in class, but when students have the chance and capacity to show they can use their knowledge and skills.”

Therefore, we as students, (also as educators), stepped outside and looked for health, wellbeing services and places of interest.

This is a photo of a small café. The following is written based on the photo.

With direct link to key knowledge from the VCE health and human development study design, which are “various definitions of health and wellbeing, including physical, social, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions” and “youth perspectives on the meaning and importance of health and wellbeing”.

We encourage the students to “describe a range of influences on the perspectives and priorities of health and wellbeing”.

 

Based on the information this photo provides and the Hart’s ladder, students will be informed of the health factors in this photo and from there forward, they will need to take their own approaches to show the level of understanding of health today through their preferred media forms. And as teachers, I will make sure students have the capacity to make inquiries and decisions.

Hart’s ladder provides an overview of the levels of participation we create for our students. It enables us to see the difference between youth participation and meaningless participation. It is not about students knowing everything, that is not important. Students asking more and more questions will however prove that participation levels are high.

 

Reference

Simovska, V. (2012). Case study of a  Participatory Health Promotion Intervention in School. Democracy in Education, 20 (1), 1-10.

In this week’s classes, we have learnt about health in the scopes of digital technologies and designs.

As Lupton said in her article Digital Health Care (2018), digital technologies are increasingly utilised on contemporary health care.

This changes many things in the way medical procedures and examinations are done. For example:

• Ultrasound for scanning patient bodies
• Artificial skins, prosthetic parts
• Wireless monitoring of various types of body conditions such as heart rate

The impact digital technologies bring to us, health care providers and health care itself is enormous, but not just within the health and medical domains.

A great example from the week’s discussions was the implementation of the Australian government’s own online medical and health information record called My Health Record. It seems a great tool for health professionals and schools because they will be able to access students and patients’ previous medical records very easily. However, on the other aspects of health, such as privacy and social environment factors, the data will not be completely safe and they are vulnerable to be used in malicious acts. Another example can be the invasive nature of some medical tests using digital technologies, such as examinations and surgeries for the intestines.

Thus, as educators, we need to be aware of the risks and inform students about the impact it can bring to them.

During class, we had created a completely fictional digital health technology device which is a tab that can be put onto your tongue and it will change the taste sense to make food taste desirable.

It is created while thinking about people with special dietary requirements like vegetarians. Lupton’s various blog posts (2017) talked about design technologies and approaches, which refers to a problem solving method through a design-based approach. Thus, with particular knowledge and skills in mind, we created a human-centred digital technology.

Moving on, design-based thinking is important for me and health education, because students are required to make and plan their own health strategies. In conjunction with Bloom’s taxonomy, design-based approaches to health education is very similar to it. Such as application of knowledge in other situations and create new information using own understandings.

 

 

Reference

Lupton, D. (forthcoming 2018). Digital Health Care.  In G. Scambler (Ed.), Sociology as applied to health and medicine (7th ed.)  London: Palgrave.

Lupton, D. (2017, April 21). Design Sociology part 2: terms and approaches [Web blog post].  Retrieved from https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/design-sociology-part-2-terms-and-approaches/

In this week’s learning, the focus was on food in health education. To elaborate on that, we also touched upon the topics of IVAC model, nutrition with reference to the food pyramid or the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating and participatory teaching pedagogies.

One reason as to educators, teachers are being called on to broaden their approach to teaching about food, taking a direct quote from Welch and Leahy’s article (2018), “The inclusion of food signifies that health education is not merely about teaching children and young people the nutritional values and guidelines, but also about food literacy and food studies more broadly.”

Plus, the new and changed Victorian Curriculum concerning food and nutrition in the health curriculum.

I find the five guidelines in their article to be very helpful to make that start for professional development, which is basically include health and physical education (HPE) propositions and cross-curriculum priorities and capabilities, teach nutrition within the broader food studies, connect with real life, community focus and critical inquiry skills and knowledge. These five guidelines interplay with the five propositions of HPE curriculum and supports the previous claim I had quoted. What this does for me as a pre-service teacher is enabling me to see the reality of HPE in classrooms and make that distinction between optimal and lacking health education lessons.

Carlsson and Simovska’s article (2012) explored school-based health promotion programs in multiple clusters of European schools with the Shape Up program. As the article suggested, it had incorporated the IVAC model which is the Investigation-Vision-Action-Change model.

The model relates to HPE’s five key propositions in the way that it is aimed for action competence in students, as explained in Carlsson and Simovska’s article (2012). In short, we give students knowledge (information) to guide them to use that information in practices and then they can devise strategies and plans for better outcomes in various domains and implement those strategies to show others if changes have occurred.

And that leads into participatory approach, which is essentially students making the moves in a learning environment as true active learners. It can be used in my own teaching by building students’ questioning capacity and develop their interest in the learning topics to make for substantial changes in their mindsets. In a best-case scenario, it would be a classroom where students are not often asked questions because they ask their own questions most of the time.

Lastly, the meme I had created. To put it in short sentences, it is created to link to area of study two in unit 1 of the VCE health and human development study design. The meme presents how the environment surrounds youths with junk food and make us think about the effects.

 

 

Reference

Carlsson, M., & Simovska, V. (2012). Exploring learning outcomes of school-based health promotion – a multiple case study.  Health Education Research, 27, 3, 437-447.

Welch, R., and Leahy, D. (forthcoming, 2018).  Beyond the pyramid or plate: Contemporary approaches to Food and Nutrition education.  Active and Healthy Journal