Health & Wellbeing in Integrated Learning Communities

I’m at a conference today ‘Developing the Developers for Curriculum for Excellence – Health and Wellbeing’, but more about that later.

One thing I thought I should write about is ‘good housekeeping’, you know the drill, where the loos are, fire exits, what time we’ll finish, turn your mobile phone to silent…’ Maybe some folk mention other things but usually someone stands up and covers the aforementioned.

Today, as I have done for a few events I’ve attended recently I’ve been doing some live micro-blogging via Twitter. At the recently wonderful event I attended on Islay (more about that later too) quite of a few folk were live tweeting, and humerous observations were made about the growing number of iPhones and mobile devices popping up during speaker’s presentations and across the whole event.

So my thoughts for future housekeeping and using interactive media includes the following..

• Let people know the arrangements for internet access including wifi.
• Let people know that it’s okay or not to ask questions during the presentation, record audio or take pictures.
• Why not ask if people if they are going to be twittering / blogging and suggest or agree a hashtag that any feedback / thoughts can be collated using searches?

Until these points are covered in the domestic arrangements by the organiser, I would really recommend that you make it known that you would like to record the event by blogging / twittering and ask if it’s okay to do that.

I think that it is vital to create the right conditions for all events as we would do in any learning environments and that goes for the presenters as well as the delegates who might just think you are checking your emails or texting about something else instead of sharing live your (hopefully) rich learning experiences with the world.

Last week I was co-facilitating on a training day for professionals who have already been on our 3 day Sexual Health and Relationships Education (SHARE) course and were looking for an update day. A key resource that my colleague Jane Groves and I highlighted was the excellent new toolkit developed by Learning and Teaching Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland on Homphobia and Homophobic Bullying. The toolkit for teachers with lesson plans can be found here.

In using materials described above it’s key to find out exactly what reporting mechanisms are in place locally, of course every school and authority will have policies in place, but finding out what else is in place to support and report both locally and nationally is crucial.

I’d like to highlight this brand new site for anyone in Highland who wishes to report hate crimes. The Hate Free Highland campaign is a multi-agency led initiative supported by the Highland Community Planning Partnership. Some text from the site.

A Hate Incident is defined as:

Any incident, which may or may not constitute a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

A hate incident can occur because of a person’s age, disability, gender, race or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or social background.

In other words it is when one person targets another through physical, verbal or any other form of abuse and you believe this abuse has been motivated by one of the following factors:

Age: where an incident is directed to a person because of their age
disability: this is sometimes called disablism and involves incidents directed at people with a wide range of disabilities such as physical or sensory impairments, learning difficulties and mental illness
gender: where an incident is directed towards people from the transgender community, as well as women or men
race or ethnic origin: this is often called racism and includes incidents directed at anyone on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic origin, nationality or national origins
religion or belief: where an incident takes place towards a person because of their faith
sexual orientation: this is sometimes called homophobia and includes an incident directed at a person who is or is thought to be lesbian, gay, transvestite, transsexual, or bisexual.
Social background: where an incident is directed at someone as a result of class, income, occupation, educational level or from a combination of these factors.

It is the understanding of victim or the witness that is important in defining a hate incident. In other words if someone thinks that an incident has been motivated by any of the factors listed above they should be reported on this website.

It’s very clear that absolutely everyone living, learning or working in a school community has a responsibility to tackle homophobia, homophobic or racist bullying whether it takes place in school or online, having the confidence to challenge and advertising reporting routes are key.

Further cyberbullying information and links to resources can be found here on the Highland E-Safety Site. Other sources of information Stonewall and Young Scot One Scotland.