Major Assignment

Hi HEALers:

I've responded, hopefully, to all the initial drafts I received. If you sent me an email and didn't get a response, please resend it as I may have inadvertently buried the email. And if you are still plugging away on the assignment opener, just send me what you have (a page or two) with your thoughts at this stage. Remember it's just a draft of an experiential starting point with some indications of the direction of your HEAL inquiry.

My caution is that you not make the assignment too big. You have the rest of the HEAL MEd to pursue this inquiry, layer it substantively, and connect it to other topics of interest.

A challenge and a help in this regard is to narrow down your topic and question. You can do this very matter-of-factly by, say, picking up the topics and questions that have wide currency in health education and promotion. Questions of children's inactivity, for example, are posed in the literature and the media. The 'social determinants of health' serve to frame big questions of equity and access. 'Health literacy' provides an answer to questions of ill-health, poor nutrition, and inactivity amongst school students and other 'educable populations. And so on.

The purpose of your starting example is to bring some greater particularity to your topic and question. Venturing into the related HEAL literatures will surely generalize this topic and your question and make them understandable to a wider readership. But in the first instance, stay a while with the particularly of the topic and the question, even if only not to rush too quickly past the pedagogical interventions and implications that are readily at hand.

A practical way of doing so is to see the opening example as an anecdote or vignette that is forever revisable. It's not set in stone, in other words, and were you to write it some months hence, or insert into it a different narrative voice, then it would come out differently. That's the 'subjectivity' of the piece, from which you want to generate not necessarily an impossible 'objectivity' but rather an 'intersubjective' resonance and applicability. If others read the piece, and are not swayed by too much editorializing, and say "yes, I can see myself in that situation and as being similarly inclined," then you have a piece that carries 'intersubjective' meaning and that contains a shared topic.

That's why it is good to read what you write to others so they can concur (or not) with the event, encounter and interaction you describe.

I hesitantly attach an article that I hope will be helpful to you. My hesitation is due to the inclusion in this article of the anecdotal writings of a published teacher-author. She puts the bar very high! And she writes in a particular narrative style that will not be your style of writing. Simply peruse this article as a teacher-focused guide to anecdotal writing that you can apply more broadly to your own HEAL practices. If nothing else, see how the starting descriptive pieces of your assignment can not just be illustrative lead-ins to the HEAL topics and questions you want to address. They can contain anecdotally the essential meanings of your topics and questions that, of course, still need literature explication and a program point of focus.

I will, as promised, be sending you in the coming days another email with readings and guideline that will take us into our next class session and the field trip.

Hope your long weekend, for those who weren't working and for those who were, was healthy, active and revitalizing.

Cheers,

Stephen.