(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Two articles in Issue #6, 2013 of Health Education Journal explore teacher views and ideas about health and health education. The first article compared teacher views about health in several European and African countries. The researchers found that women, older teachers, better educated, elementary and language teachers were more apt to hold positive views about health, with significant differences existing between countries. The second article examined the ideas of over 100 Italian teachers, exploring "the relationships among teachers’ health representations, their ideas about health promotion, their working conditions and their involvement in health-promotion activities at school. The results show that teachers have ambiguous health representations; however, the traditional idea of health as absence of illness was prevalent among the teachers surveyed. Regarding health-promotion activities, the teachers seemed to prefer health education programmes based on informative techniques. Some representations of health were connected to the importance that teachers attributed to health promotion and to teachers’ participation in health-promotion activities. Teachers’ working conditions appear not to be related to their involvement in health promotion." Read more>>
RSS Feed