Network 8 participants this year consisted both of returning participants and first year participants, creating opportunities for interesting sessions, and for meetings with colleagues from all over the world, making and following up on plans for collaboration.
The network had a full program, and the overall quality of the sessions was good. The program included a symposium in two parts, a panel discussion (unfortunately cancelled due to illness), and a number of paper sessions. It also included a workshop on transformative research approaches, which the network meeting pointed out is the kind of stimulating and interactive session we want more of. This year’s special call "Inclusion-exclusion: The contribution of health education and health educational research" was linked to the overall conference call. The special call was addressed in quite a few sessions, hereunder in the two parts symposium "School Food, Equity and Social Justice".
The main overall research field of network 8 includes education, learning and health promotion in schools. This year there were fewer sessions than usual addressing learning processes and outcomes of health education and school health promotion, perhaps due to the special call. The themes in the paper sessions where centered around Health literacy, Gender and Sexuality, Food and sleep, School Climate and collaboration, and School wellbeing.
Especially school wellbeing stands out as a main theme in the 2018 programme, in continuation of the growing numbers of sessions over the last years focusing on school wellbeing: This year we had 7 sessions focusing on professional’s role in wellbeing, pupils and teachers' views on wellbeing, and critical perspectives on wellbeing, linked to inclusion-exclusion issues in education.
We were pleased with this year's joint session with network 18 (Sport Pedagogy) "Health, physical activity and wellbeing", as this topic is at the heart of both networks research interests. However, we also discussed the possibility of inviting our networks to a pre-call for a joint session next year in order to support coherence across papers.
Plans made last year was to continue the tradition of an opening session for the network, with an invited talk. This year we included this part in the network meeting where participants from the host country Italy - Denis Francesconi and Cristina Palmieri from Milano University - presented.
In relation to publication plans two ideas for special issues in the Journal of Health Education were discussed at the network meeting: “Leadership in school health promotion” (suggested pre-conference by Kevin Dadaczynski), and “School food” (suggested by Monica Carlsson). Kevin Dadaczynski takes the lead in relation to the first suggestion, and in relation to the latter suggestion (related to the papers in the symposium on school food) we decided to proceed with a book proposal for the Routledge series on Health Education.