EDUC 816: Welcome

Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to EDUC 816, the second in a series of courses that make up the HEAL program. I look forward to our collective enquiry into how our visions of health and healthful living can best inform our efforts to inspire active living practices and the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of health education programs. I have attached a brief course outline for EDUC 816 that will give you a high-level sense of the kinds of things we will explore together.

Having had the benefit of viewing your blog posts from your inaugural course with Stephen, I am thrilled to be joining you as your instructor for a part of your professional journey. One of the things that I myself have always been curious about is human cognition – how we discover, learn about, and make sense of the world – and how our interactions with one another and with the environment around us shape our lives, including our health. I believe in experiential, discovery learning — and our course will reflect that. There will be plenty of opportunities to learn from, and be inspired by, one another as individuals and health education professionals.

When we meet in four weeks, I will present a more detailed vision for the course, and we will take the time to start getting to know one another, our interests and aspirations. I will also share more about myself, what piques my interest and inspires me, and the kinds of health education programs I have been involved in imagining, creating, rolling out, and evaluating. My plan is to weave examples from the settings that are most familiar to me — a mix of academic, professional and community — into our classes, to help illustrate how effective programs can be created, why 'usual' approaches may not always work well, and what to watch for when turning ideas into programs. I invite you to share with the class your experiences in crafting health education programs, as well as your questions, struggles, and grand ideas. In our classes, I will be challenging us to contemplate the best educational designs possible, and explore together what health knowledge, behaviour, and/or attitude changes the programs we imagine can bring about, and what it would take to sustain those changes.

We will meet in SUR 2710 on January 20 from 4:30 to 9 p.m. Please plan to come on time, so we can get the most out of our time together.

I checked with the SFU Bookstore on the Surrey campus, and they have our textbook on shelf already. The SFU Library in Surrey also has a reserve copy (3-day loan). The book I selected is McKenzie, J.F., Neiger, B.L., & Thackeray, R. (2008). Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating Health Promotion Programs: A Primer (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Benjamin Cummings. This book speaks to the continuum that includes program development and implementation, so you may also find it to be a useful resource when you take EDUC 830 later on. You may start to explore this book at your leisure.

In preparation for our first class, please study the brief Chapter 1 of the textbook (pp. 1-14) as well as Appendix A (pp. 391-395). Also, bring to our class discussion one or two examples of health education programs (or some aspects of programs) that you have come across in your professional life and that you find particularly effective — or particularly challenging — in promoting active living and/or overall good health.

I hope you will find EDUC 816 positively challenging and both professionally and personally rewarding. I look forward to meeting you in person. In the meantime, I hope your holidays are merry and the new year full of rewarding encounters and pursuits.

Sincerely,

Michal Fedeles, PhD