Health and wellbeing are complex, but Magda's Big National Health Check provides educators with a wonderful opportunity to engage their students in learning about them.
Magda Szubanski and friends spend time considering a range of health issues that Australians currently face, and they delve into the various factors that powerfully shape those issues and our health.
The show takes us on a journey, leading us down a "path less travelled" as we learn how the environments in which we live impact our health.
Loading...We need to recognise that many factors impact health
An important aspect in learning about health is to focus on the social determinants of health.
This means thinking beyond the ways in which health is often presented as all about individual bodies and "bad choices", as this can lead to blame, shame and decreased motivation for social change.
The show beautifully demonstrates how our environments can make "choosing health" very challenging.
Health is deeply connected to a range of factors: everyday relationships; where we live; our families and communities; and broader corporations, government policies and global politics.
Once we recognise this, we can support one another to make local changes and develop more supportive, sustainable and healthy environments.
Loading...We need a cross-curriculum approach to teaching health
To help us learn about how these environments impact on our health, educators will need to adopt a cross-curriculum approach.
So while Health and Physical Education might be seen as the go-to subject area, we actually need to forge curriculum connections with geography; civics and citizenship; science; design and technologies; media arts; English; mathematics; and more, to help us both understand and take action for health.
We also need to include student voices as a key ingredient in the pedagogical mix, as this enables educators to activate their classrooms so that students not only learn about health, but they can also actually take action on community health issues.
Imagine that your students are community health researchers, and invite them to develop research questions, collect data and explore solutions to different school and community health topics.
Make connections with local government and other key decision-makers to enable your students to share their ideas for a healthier community with the people who can help transform their community.
Loading...Overall, Magda's Big National Health Check provides us a great deal of food for thought, and it helps us reimagine health education while at the same time contributing to the creation of a healthier future for all.
Deana Leahy, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, and Megan Warin, Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide.