Session Information
08 SES 11, Innovative Teaching-Learning Strategies within Health Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The presentation reports on a study of two health-theatre plays for children. One for pre-school children between 3 and 6 years and one for schoolchildren between 6 and 9 years. The two plays are created and performed by the same theatre group and are based on the same basic principles of communicating information about health through humour, dancing and singing. Both storylines are packed with creative and funny characters and communicate a general message of health and healthy behaviour primarily focusing on food and exercise. The children are encouraged to take part in the dancing and the plays contain some dialogue between children and actors.
The main research focus is on what kinds of knowledge the children acquire from the shows and how this acquirement of knowledge is linked to the levels of participation and the children’s development of identities. Interventions focussing on children’s knowledge about health face complex problems concerning the children’s often unpredictably individual and diverse ways of orienting and navigating in the veritable jungle of different kinds of campaigns and interventions focussing on children’s health promotion. To strengthen the health-pedagogical and health-promoting actions in school and pre-school, and to ensure the children’s involvement in these actions, it is important to gain a better understanding of how the children’s acquirement of knowledge and their identity development are connected and how professionals working in the school and pre-school setting can influence this interconnected process.
The theoretical framework for the analysis of the children’s health knowledge is based in constructivist educational sociology with the main theory being Qvortrup’s four orders of knowledge: First order knowledge is what the children know that they know. Second order knowledge is what the children know that they do not know. Third order knowledge is what the children do not know that they know. Fourth order knowledge is what the children do not know that they do not know. With these four orders it is possible to describe the differences in the children’s acquirement of health knowledge and it enables us to observe the characteristics and potentials in these knowledge differences.
To gain knowledge about the connection between knowledge and identity a double theoretical base is needed. In these research studies we combine knowledge theory and identity theories by focussing on participatory and relational aspects of the interdependencies of school children’s orientation towards themselves, toward each other and toward the communication and information they encounter in and outside the school. In the analysis identities are viewed as communicatively constituted. The communication-identityprovides educational sociology with a different framework for viewing identity related issues which mean that the conditions for gaining and developing an identity can be isolated and analysed in a more functional and dynamic way - with communication, observation, self-reference, participation and interactions being the main points of interest.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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