Health & Wellbeing in Integrated Learning Communities

Growing up as a child of the seventies, I have to admit I have a few early memories that probably age me somewhat. I recall at at early age being drawn to one great read, more commonly found at my Nans house but the other place was at the doctors surgery waiting room table.

The ‘Reader’s Digest’ had two great sections, probably the only ones digestable by a 10 year old. One was ‘It pays to enrich your word power’ and the other was ‘Laughter is the best medicine!’

‘It pays to enrich your word power’ was a quiz testing you on different meanings of words. I thought about how language has evolved when I came across the great website Urban Dictionary a couple of weeks ago. This is a great resource bringing new words and phrases to life. It also has a handy ‘word of the day’ (warning  - some can be a bit rude) RSS feed and can email you a new word everyday, how fantastic! I must admit I really enjoy opening my inbox everyday and am eager to see a new word for the day. Here’s my favourite 3 new words sent to me over the last couple of weeks.

‘moneymoon’
The time after your purchase of a good or service and before ‘buyer’s remorse’ happens.
The moneymoon is over, I realize now that buying that boat was a waste of money.

’slacktivism’

The act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.

Signing an email petition to stop rampant crime is slacktivism. Want to really make your community safer? Get off your ass and start a neighborhood watch!

And finally..

‘twitterpated’

1)to be completely enamored with someone/something.
2) the flighty exciting feeling you get when you think about/see the object of your affection.
3) romantically excited (i.e.: aroused)
4) the ever increasing acceleration of heartbeat and body temperature as a result of being engulfed amidst the exhilaration and joy of being/having a romantic entity in someone’s life.

When he smiled at her, the rush of warm, fuzzy, excited sensations that filled her made her realize she was completely twitterpated with this man.

This last one brings a new sense of meaning to ‘Twitter’! Moneymoon, just reminds me so much of the In The Wild event at SLF last year when Carol Craig talked about what truly makes us happy..short term retail therapy isn’t it..it’s the wider sense of belonging to something bigger that makes us have a sense of wellbeing. And, Slactivism, I’m sure we all know someone guilty of that!

The second part of this post is dedicated to laughter the best medicine, I was at a great networking event in Argyll and Bute last week, celebrating the work of schools in the area dedicated to putting health and the heart of learning, the key outcome amongst all the others was to ‘have fun’. There was plenty of laughs all round.

Here’s a little something I’ve found on the internet to remind you how important it is to have a laugh along the way. Enjoy!

Pic - Coulhill Primary School, Healthy Highland Week 2007

Part of my work at the moment is developing a ‘Lifestyle Survey’ in Highland in order to monitor our progress in Health and Wellbeing and our Children’s Plan. The final product will be a bi-annual survey for P7, S2 and S4 young people. Some national surveys we have been asked to conduct in our classrooms e.g. SALSUS focus on negative behaviour rather than lifestyles in general. I really wonder how young people feel about being asked about these things rather than what they positively do, enjoy and take heart in.

The current national paper-based questionnaires seem to ’glean’ information from our pupils and certainly don’t employ any ‘active learning methods’ and to be honest, what do young people get out of it? So how does our Highland survey differ?

The lifestyle survey in Highland has been developed to be a supportive learning process, rather than ‘gleaning’ data. So this is how we hope it will go…Firstly through a class-based session, the teacher will explain the purposes for needing information and the importance of health and a sense of wellbeing. Pupils will keep a diary for a week, which is completely private, recording aspects of lifestyle. After the week is up each pupil will complete an anonymous online survey which provides a snapshot of their lifestyle in that past week based on their diaries. After-care is provided, support will be there for anyone wishing to discuss any aspects of the survey. A multi-agency approach will be adopted involving school staff, School Nurses, Youth Workers, Active School Co-ordinators etc and signposts to web links.

The questions in the 10-minute online survey cover many aspects of lifestyle. The pilot we recently carried out with 6 schools showed how crucial it is to ensure the questions are posed accurately. I can’t reveal the results of the pilot as it was a fairly small sample but it did make us significantly change the questions.

I’m particularly interested to see our results in the category of ‘communication’ which covers internet access and usage. We are mirroring the national data collected by CEOP regarding SNS sites etc, so it will be great to have our on Highland perspective, it will also be incredibly useful in informing our new E-safety Steering Group.

The techy bit!

A website has been purchased to host the online survey in Highland, password protected of course. The survey uses limesurvey software. We chose limesurvey as you can have unlimited amount of participants and the data will be able to be transported to SPSS and MS Excel, it’s also free of charge and developed by research specialists who are constantly looking to refine their software by offering it as shareware. After having a scoot around with my colleague Andy McNeil at all the different types of survey software we really found this to be the best one to use.

As soon as we conduct our survey I’ll  post the results, but for now, please see some excellent research conducted by the threebillion project, it really puts thing in a global perspective.

Thanks to Jim for linking me the threebillion.com project and their video on youtube

Pic - Kilchoan Primary School on Sanna Beach