Health Education in Context: An International Perspective on Health Education in Schools and Local Communities


Book Description

This book presents an international perspective on health education and specifically the influence that context has on this aspect of education. The focus includes both formal and non-formal health education and the factors that impact upon its effectiveness, particularly in non-Western and non-English-speaking contexts (i.e., outside the UK, USA, Australia, NZ, etc.). An important feature of the book is that it draws upon the experiences and research of local experts, representing the perspectives of an extremely diverse cohort across the world (22 countries and 2 regions in total). The book addresses topics such as: the development and implementation of health education in different countries; the influence of political, cultural, societal or religious mores; governmental or ministerial drives; economic or other pressures driving curriculum reform; and the influence of external assessment regimes on health education. By embedding discussions of health education in local contexts and representing a diversity of perspectives on this important topic this book highlights both barriers and enablers to improving health education across the globe.




Who Will Keep the Public Healthy?


Book Description

Bioterrorism, drug-resistant disease, transmission of disease by global travel . . . there's no shortage of challenges facing America's public health officials. Men and women preparing to enter the field require state-of-the-art training to meet these increasing threats to the public health. But are the programs they rely on provide the high caliber professional training they require? Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? provides an overview of the past, present, and future of public health education, assessing its readiness to provide the training and education needed to prepare men and women to face 21st century challenges. Advocating an ecological approach to public health, the Institute of Medicine examines the role of public health schools and degree-granting programs, medical schools, nursing schools, and government agencies, as well as other institutions that foster public health education and leadership. Specific recommendations address the content of public health education, qualifications for faculty, availability of supervised practice, opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and education, cooperation with government agencies, and government funding for education. Eight areas of critical importance to public health education in the 21st century are examined in depth: informatics, genomics, communication, cultural competence, community-based participatory research, global health, policy and law, and public health ethics. The book also includes a discussion of the policy implications of its ecological framework.




Health Education


Book Description

Health Education: Critical perspectives provides a socio-cultural and critical approach to health education. The book draws together international experts in the fields of health and education who deconstruct contemporary discourses and practices, and re-imagine a health education that both connects with young people and offers a way forward in addressing issues of health and wellbeing. Chapters within specifically link academic work on neoliberalism, healthism, risk and the body to wider discourses of health and health education. They challenge current practices and call for a re-thinking of current health programs in education settings. A unique feature of this book is the analyses of health education from both political and applied levels across a range of international contexts. The book is divided into three sections: the social and political contexts informing health education how individual health issues (sexuality, alcohol, mental health, the body and obesity, nutrition) articulate in education in complex ways alternative ways to think about health and health education pedagogy. The overall theme of the book offers a perspective that the current approach to health education – promoting a fear of ill health, self-surveillance and individual responsibility – can become a form of health fascism, and we need to be cognisant of this potential and its consequences for young people. The book will be of key interest to academics and researchers exploring the political context of health education.




Critical Pedagogies in Physical Education, Physical Activity and Health


Book Description

• Introduces pedagogy for teaching health in the context of physical education and exercise • Health, PE and physical activity are commonly taught alongside each other at degree level • Examines principles, policy and best practice • Includes authors and cases from around the world • Each chapter includes features to encourage the reader to reflect on their own practice




Teachers as Health Workers


Book Description

Schooling has long been held responsible for the health and well-being of children. However, against an international background of rising concern about students’ performance and well-being, schools and teachers have faced escalating expectations of their health-related work. While various stakeholders have ideas about what teachers’ health work entails, we know little about teachers’ contributions, engagement and personal satisfaction with this work. As teachers’ work represents a significant national investment, insight into the cost–benefit of teachers’ health work is vital to establishing the broader economic contribution of schools to society. Teachers as Health Workers offers a critical perspective on these matters, documenting the day-to-day work of Australian teachers as they grapple with the challenges, and joys, of balancing education and health-related responsibilities. Whilst shifts in policy, economics and globalisation influence localised enactment of teachers’ health work, the economic modelling, theorising and methodological innovations of this research address enduring themes and challenges. Consequently, this book’s critical perspective reveals policy-practice gaps in government strategies seeking to create a healthy and productive population. The book will inform education, health and industrial policies and provide direction for teachers’ initial or ongoing preparation as health workers.




Careful Eating: Bodies, Food and Care


Book Description

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ’why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ’eating’ and ’caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.




Healthy Cities


Book Description

This forward-looking resource recasts the concept of healthy cities as not only a safe, pleasant, and green built environment, but also one that creates and sustains health by addressing social, economic, and political conditions. It describes collaborations between city planning and public health creating a contemporary concept of urban governance—a democratically-informed process that embraces values like equity. Models, critiques, and global examples illustrate institutional change, community input, targeted assessment, and other means of addressing longstanding sources of urban health challenges. In these ambitious pages, healthy cities are rooted firmly in the worldwide movement toward balanced and sustainable urbanization, developed not to disguise or displace entrenched health and social problems, but to encourage and foster solutions. Included in the coverage: Towards healthy urban governance in the century of the city“/li> Healthy cities emerge: Toronto, Ottawa, Copenhagen The role of policy coalitions in understanding community participation in healthy cities projects Health impact assessment at the local level The logic of method for evaluating healthy cities Plus: extended reports on healthy cities and communities in North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East Healthy Cities will interest and inspire community leaders, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs working to improve health and well-being at the local level, as well as public health and urban development scholars and professionals.




Schools, Food and Social Learning


Book Description

This book explores the potential of school dining halls as spaces of social learning through interactions between students and teachers. Schools, Food and Social Learning highlights the neglect of school dining halls in sociological research and the fact that so much can be gained from fostering interpersonal relations with other students and the school staff over meals. The book focuses primarily on social and life skills that students develop during lunch-hour meetings, modelling behaviors while eating and conversing in the school space known as the ‘restaurant’. With case studies based in the UK, the book takes a social constructivist approach to dealing with the tensions and challenges between the aims of the school – creating an eating space that promotes social values and encourages the development of social skills, and the activities of teachers and catering assistants of managing and providing food for many students daily. The book carries snippets of interviews with children, dining hall attendants, teachers, parents and the school leadership team, offering a new way of thinking about social learning for both scholars and students of Social Anthropology, Sociology, Social Policy, Food Policy, Education Studies and Childhood Studies.




Oxford Textbook of Global Public Health


Book Description

Sixth edition of the hugely successful, internationally recognised textbook on global public health and epidemiology, with 3 volumes comprehensively covering the scope, methods, and practice of the discipline




A Framework for Educating Health Professionals to Address the Social Determinants of Health


Book Description

The World Health Organization defines the social determinants of health as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life." These forces and systems include economic policies, development agendas, cultural and social norms, social policies, and political systems. In an era of pronounced human migration, changing demographics, and growing financial gaps between rich and poor, a fundamental understanding of how the conditions and circumstances in which individuals and populations exist affect mental and physical health is imperative. Educating health professionals about the social determinants of health generates awareness among those professionals about the potential root causes of ill health and the importance of addressing them in and with communities, contributing to more effective strategies for improving health and health care for underserved individuals, communities, and populations. Recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to develop a high-level framework for such health professional education. A Framework for Educating Health Professionals to Address the Social Determinants of Health also puts forth a conceptual model for the framework's use with the goal of helping stakeholder groups envision ways in which organizations, education, and communities can come together to address health inequalities.