Hi HEALers:
I hope you all were able to recharge your batteries yesterday. For my part, I found our Friday and Saturday time together to be highly stimulating and leaving me with much to think about in terms of the 'practices' of health education, health promotion and health care. Although working in very professional contexts, we can certainly learn from one another how to take on the challenges and "social determinants of health" in very practical, local and life-changing ways.
Our cohort increasingly becomes the crucible for what we read, discuss and write. In saying that, I mean that as we get to know one another better and become comfortable sharing our ideas, our hopes and aspirations, the class times and communications in and around these times become the "curriculum." This sense of a LIVING CURRICULUM includes everything from being sensitive enough to know when a food break is needed to the careful listening and responsiveness to one another that build understandings and become the interpersonal guides to practical agency. We change our seating, connect with cohort members whom we haven't spoken with very much. We come to listen and help one another find words to express what may only yet be a good intuition. The term bandied around for all this is "creating learning communities." But that term, while a good one, does not necessarily get at the relational dynamics that are at the core of whatever it is that makes for vibrant, diverse, challenging, empowering and generative "learning communities."
I've mentioned in a previous email the wonderful text written by Alphonso Lingis called "The Community or Those Who Have Nothing in Common." The narrative I quoted from this text illustrates a beyond-the-usual-community imperative to respond well to another. It is, for me, a reminder to keep attuning to the everyday, practical tasks with a responsiveness inspired by those who have such an expansive appreciation of community that it includes those with whom we at first seem to have little if anything in common.
Our planned curriculum, which is to say, our current EDUC 820 course on "Current Issues in Curriculum and Pedagogy" is rightly a curriculum COMMONPLACE where we find the space and time to bring to otherwise abstract theoretical matters to life. (There is much educational literature on all this, ever since Joseph Schwab shifted the sense of curriculum from the planned, techno-rational processes of designing, developing, implementing and evaluating educational programs thought to be good for others to greater consideration of the commonplaces of the subject matter, the nature of the learners themselves, the teachers and their lives, and the specific contexts in which learning happens. Since Schwab's writings, and building on the earlier writings of John Dewey, curriculum scholars and practitioners have taken the message to heart. The next course with Robin Brayne will provide opportunity for you to dig into this curriculum scholarship some more.)
I mention the CURRICULUM connection at this particular juncture in our current course because it is indicated in the Nov 25-26 topic title I put in the course outline, namely, "Health Education and Active Living: Curricular Constructions." My original intention was for us to consider the models, frameworks, guides, plans, and so on that we use to make sense of where we are heading, or where we want to head, in our respective workplaces. This topic pertains to where I anticipate many of you now find yourselves in your HEAL inquiries as you think your way from the personal narratives to the articulation of key concepts and themes and, in turn, to the "So what now?" questions. Does your inquiry topic require you to invent a new curriculum wheel or can you draw upon or adapt existing programs, plans, frameworks and guides? For instance, do behavioral, or life course, or social-ecological models of health care, health promotion and health education help you articulate the "so what?" question? Do health models drawn from indigenous ways of knowing help you? Do "One Health" and "Holistic Health" models speak to you and your inquiry interests?
If you are not at this point of considering "curriculum constructions" don't worry. Besides which, it is better to be exploratory in the inquiry assignment than rush too quickly into developing curricula that are assumed to be good for others. As we know from K-12 education, the road is paved with good educational intentions but littered with so many curriculum documents!
Since we have such a short time between now and Friday, I will not overload you with readings. We already have parts 5 and 6 of the "Social Determinants of Health" on "Social Exclusion and Public Policy" to address. And you have the inquiry assignment to work on. But if you have any time, you might want to look up:
World Health Organization (2012). "Health education: Theoretical concepts, effective strategies and core competencies. A foundation document to guide capacity development of health educators." You can download this PDF by just googling the above title.
A second source is a website with which I am involved:
Function2Flow: An interdisciplinary model for health and physical education
http://function2flow.ca/
Here you can find the "Function2Flow" curriculum framework to which I am somewhat attached as a model for cultivating a movement disposition through the great variety of physical activities available to us.
A continuing concern I have is that when we consider health education, health promotion and health care we tend to confine our interests to human beings and humanly-built environments. I know some of you are particularly interested in healthy relations and connections with the "natural world" and with the critters that comprise the larger world in which we all live but with which too many of us have such very limited connection.
If you poke through the Function2Flow website you will find the link to the recent International Human Sciences Research conference where there was much interest in the "more-than-human-world" and in relations and sensitivities that go beyond built environments. Check out the edited videos of the keynote talks and responses:
http://function2flow.ca/home-7/welcome-to-the-35th-international-human-science-research-conference-ihsrc-uottawa-july-3-7-2016
Finally, for those of you who are particularly interested in movement, physical activity and fitness, there are some really interesting initiatives that provide inspiration for K-12 programs, community recreation planning and, in general, for helping us look beyond the limitations of current Health and PE, Daily PE and Physical Activity programs. These initiatives, while not particularly new if we look back in time, are at least offering some 'fresh' perspectives.
Here are three examples:
The Movement! Ido Portal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Wr7HsylE0
The Workout the World Forgot by MovNat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKGF-ErsJiI
Dr. Mercola and Katy Bowman (Full Interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy7iL33g-tM
See you all on Friday.
Cheers,
Stephen.
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