What does it mean to be healthy? In researching and writing my second book (Health Teens, Healthy Schools: How Media Literacy Can Save Education in the United States) I explore the intersection of media literacy, health literacy and civic engagement among adolescent youth. The book’s premise is that in order to cultivate a healthy population, we need a coalition of parents, educators, and community organizations to educate inside and outside of schools about “health” across physiological, intellectual and social—and I will add “curricular”—dimensions. As a teacher educator, I am particularly invested in cross-disciplinary whole school curriculum, although it is contested terrain.
An essential pedagogical strategy in accomplishing health literacy is media literacy, which empowers people of all ages to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound. It is the skillful application of literacy skills to media and technology messages. In the current issue of The Journal of Media Literacy Education (for which I am co-editor) Joan Wharf Higgins and Deborah Begoray explore this new terrain of critical media health literacy [read more]. It is an important construct in exploring the multiple curricular, social and mediated dimensions of health education.
In the U.S. we have numerous opportunities as well as challenges in cultivating health literacy among children and adolescents. This point emerges simply yet poignantly in Jamie Oliver’s failed attempt at fostering an affinity for real chicken vs. processed chicken nuggets among a group of U.S. children (he was successful in his attempt with British children, by the way). It’s worth watching:
There are currently numerous grass roots organizations, local and national movements that are coalescing around children and adolescent health literacy. I will highlight them in a future post. In teasing out the issues, I’ve created a very short list of some of the key issues/stances:
- Combating childhood obesity
- Increasing physical movement
- Reducing hazardous toxins within environmental ecologies of youth (including the prevention of alcohol and tobacco use)
- Promoting the safe production, consumption and sustainability of “real” food
- Developing digital and media literacy about issues related to body image, food labeling, news reporting, governmental policies and practices.
What is paramount to media literacy education is avoiding teaching children what to think. Rather, media literacy is about teaching children how to think: How to find out nutritional information for themselves; how to use sound judgment in making food choices; how to discern the codes and conventions of persuasive advertising. With Jamie Oliver’s “failed” experiment, the importance lies in encouraging children to consider what comprises the food they eat and how their food is made. I am less interested in health media literacy that promotes specific ideological agendas to which young people “should” subscribe. Rather, my goal is to promote understanding and empowerment so that young people can make informed choices for themselves—and utilize their critical thinking skills and civic responsibility to serve their communities. And continue doing so as adults.
Feel free to comment below if you have one you’d like to add a resource that is worth exploring for my forthcoming book, Health Teens, Healthy Schools: How Media Literacy Can Save Education in the United States.
You can order a copy of my first book, Rethinking Technology in Schools (Peter Lang) in the PLAY Store for $18.95.