(An item from the ISHN Member information service) The articles in Issue #2, 2015 of European Journal of Education form a special issue on one of the pillars used by UNESCO and many countries to frame the purposes and goals of education and school systems. The title of the issue asks "Learning to Be — Idealism or Core Business?". As many will know, the 1996 Delors report to UNESCO introduced four pillars around which education and learning should be organized: learning to know; learning to do; learning to live together; and learning to be. ‘ The earlier UNESCO report, the Faure report, had been focused on "learning to be" and expressed grave concerns that educational purpose may end up being subject to technical, vocational and economic interests rather than a liberating force for universal progress and humanism. This special issue takes us back to this debate. Many of the articles in the issue address this question directly and through examples of various national education systems in Latin America, Germany, Canada, England. "Do Our Education Systems Do Enough to Enable Learners to Flourish as Independent, Autonomous and Well-Balanced Individuals? For those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the forces and debates shaping school systems as we seek to integrate health and social programs more firmly within education systems, this issue is a must read. Read more>>
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(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Volume 36 of the Annual Review of Public Health describes some of the lessons we have collectively learned about complex interventions to improve health, especiually the ways that complex systems thinking is being used in clinical settings. "Complexity—resulting from interactions among many component parts—is a property of both the intervention and the context (or system) into which it is placed. Complexity increases the unpredictability of effects. Complexity invites new approaches to logic modeling, definitions of integrity and means of standardization, and evaluation. New metaphors and terminology are needed to capture the recognition that knowledge generation comes from the hands of practitioners/ implementers as much as it comes from those usually playing the role of intervention researcher. Failure to acknowledge this may blind us to the very mechanisms we seek to understand. Researchers in clinical settings are documenting health improvement gains made as a consequence of complex systems thinking. Improvement science in clinical settings has much to offer researchers in population health." This succinct summary, presented in the abstract, captures many of the lessons that need to be applied. Since ISHN sponsors a Wikipedia style web site that uses the slogan "where (research) evidence meets (professional) experience, and since many of the summaries in that web site attempt to explain these new ideas based on ecological, systems-based thinking, we highly recommend this article. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #6, 2015 of American Journal of Public Health contends that the 200+ health awareness days, weeks and months do little to promote health or well-being. Schools are often a big part of these awareness activities, often viewing the participation in these days to be akin to addressing the problem. The authors "contend that health awareness days are not held to appropriate scrutiny given the scale at which they have been embraced and are misaligned with research on the social determinants of health and the tenets of ecological models of health promotion. We examined health awareness days from a critical public health perspective and offer empirically supported recommendations to advance the intervention strategy. If left unchecked, health awareness days may do little more than reinforce ideologies of individual responsibility and the false notion that adverse health outcomes are simply the product of misinformed behaviors. Read more>>
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