Reflection

Year 5 Sex education class, lets use guest speakers, be interactive and address real questions from young people.... skip 7 years, VCE Health Class, read chapter 3, answer questions from 2-9... Sense something wrong?

Writing this blog for other teachers has personally allowed me to reflect on my current teaching mentality and build my on my pedagogical approach. The last 4 blogs about Food, Digital learning, Youth Voice and Sexuality has emphasised the overwhelming potential to not only engage students in their learning, but empower them to do something with it. 

Reflecting back to the IVAC model, when creating units large or small it is beneficial to recognise the how investigation can lead to change and action. It is important to note that within your classrooms participation of student's will be ever changing (remember these students have more in their life than your class) as shown in Harts (1994) Ladder example, the many levels of participation. Building a holistic approach to our Health classes and noticing how to ignite our students various strengths within different units of work. 

Throughout the digital media and sexuality post, we covered the positive elements of media and how shaming and negative adult voice can further distance ourselves from youths. Albury (2013) urges us as educators to guide students to see media objectively initially, to decode what is actually being represented. This activity of encoding and decoding was originally demonstrated to educate on social media images, but there is real merit of these skills when deciphering health messages and opinion view points. The 'Meme' is an example where students can use their critical knowledge and decode how and why the message is depicting itself in a certain way and who the message is directed at.

As a pre service educator, creating this blog post has shown that no content is too complex or dense to incorporate 21st century pedagogies. If the Masters of Education course can allow time and space for guest speakers, new IT skills, using real world problems and problem solving. Then why can't our VCE content show the same level of modernness and sophistication?

Welch (2018) has brought my attention to the two things: 
First, recognising programming and planning teaching, learning and assessment of curricular. According to ACARA, the educative intent of the Health and P.E emphasises the teaching of disciplinary knowledge, understanding and skills that underpin HPE and how students will make meaning of and apply them in contemporary health contexts (ACARA, 2012). 
Secondly, how to apply these learnings into real life situations. 

Simplify the complex nature of how we use participatory methods into our work as Health educators. Work with students, not for them.

Thanks for reading!
 #CHANGEIT

Reference:

Albury, K. (2013). Young people, media and sexual learning: Rethinking representation. Sex Education, 13 (1), S32–S44. 

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2012). The shape of the Australian curriculum Version 4.0. Sydney: ACARA. Retrieved from http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/The_Shape_of_the_Australian_Curriculum_v4.pdf

Beetham, H., & Sharpe, R. (Eds.). (2013). Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: Designing for 21st century learning. routledge.

Hart, R. (1994). Children's participation. Florence, Italy: UNICEF International Child Development Centre.

Welch, R., Leahy, D. (2018). Beyond the pyramid or plate: Contemporary approaches to Food and Nutrition education. 

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