Global Working Group on Health Literacy/Life Skills/Social Inclusion

The FRESH Partners have established a Global Working Group to develop advice on how global agencies and countries/states can address the challenge of promoting knowledge, skills and attitudes on a wide variety of basic education, health and social issues within the core curricula/programs promoting health and personal development (HPSD). The project will address three over-arching areas of knowledge and skills; including basic literacy in the many topics related to health and safety, life, social and coping skills, and social inclusion values/beliefs such as global citizenship, social responsibility and sustainable development, The project will seek to identify feasible minimum learning outputs for school systems in three different contexts; high resource, low resource and conflict/disaster-affected. Please see the Terms of Reference for this Working Group here.

This advice will be useful in developing indicators that can be integrated within the UN Sustainable Development Goal #4.7, where the targets remain somewhat vague and incomplete. The advice will also be useful because most of the research and program development in HPSD education has been driven by topic-specific funding that defines the optimal learning for those issues. This project will start with what is feasible and realistic for all students to achieve in the three different contexts through a core curriculum, co-curricular activities/routines and non-formal learning. The project will also examine what is feasible and measurable in the emerging models of cross-curricular, competency-based learning now being used in several high resource countries.

The process will begin in January 2018 and be conducted over several months primarily through on-line and web-based activities. The goal of the project is to develop or initiate processes that describe realistic benchmarks for countries/states and UN agencies relative to the three types of contexts.  The outputs from the Work Group will include:
  • a description of current practices and capacities in delivering HPSD education in the three contexts, based on practitioner accounts and advice. This "real-world", practitioner-led assessment of the core HPSD education and learning taking place in the three types of contexts will make a unique contribution to policy, program and research discussions in that it will define the current and potential but realistic "adsorbtive capacity" of education systems rather than simply preparing more and more lists of optimal learning outputs for the many, many health and social issues/topics. The discussions will ten examine how much can be taught/learned in a core HPSD curriculum/program or across the entire curriculum as well as in regular, sustainable co-curricular activities/school routines and non-formal learning activities. 
  • a web-linked listing of official HPSD programs/curricula in all 200+ countries and many of their states and provinces.
  • a brief survey of country and state officials estimations of the education actually being delivered in their respective schools as well as a their responses to a limited set of related questions to determine the status of their policies and programs relative to the core components/pillars of the FRESH Framework
  • descriptions of current practices and capacities in HPSD-related teacher education and development in the three contexts
  • summaries or better, feasible policies and practices whereby countries and states can draw from several paradigms in the three learning domains of knowledge/literacy, skills and beliefs/attitudes. These paradigms will include
       - Basic literacy in health and safety, including functional knowledge related to various topics such as child sexual and economic exploitation, hygiene, infectious diseases, abuse & neglect, nutrition, bullying, substance abuse, mental health, climate change, environmental hazards as well as the ability to access/use reliable information and support from parents, peers, health services, protection/police services, trusted adults including media literacy and safety
       - Life skills, including practical life skills, coping skills related to resilience, conflict resolution skills, social and emotional intelligence, essential family life skills, decision-making, youth development, engagement & empowerment
       - Social inclusion, including global citizenship, peace education, social responsibility, sustainable development, ethics/morals, education to prevent extremism, education to promote diversity and inclusion of students with disabilities/special needs
  • lists of topics/issues likely to be relevant to the three contexts are being developed in other projects and will be considered by this Work Group in order to define the potential coverage, scope and sequence that should be considered by countries. Preliminary work on these lists has identified over 25 such topics for low resource countries, over 75 issues/topics for high resource countries and over 20 topics for countries recovering from emergencies. This Work Group will challenge experts and program leaders on some of these topics to define and align their topic/issue within a capacity and instructional time defined earlier.
  • defining the potential, contextually relevant learning outputs for all of these topics is well-beyond the capacity of this particular Work Group, so an International Research Network and research program will be formed in partnership with the World Educational research Association to conduct that research/development over several months and years. 
  • In a similar manner, a follow up group on teacher education and development will develop contextually relevant descriptions of the skills competencies required of regular classroom and specialist teachers, map out a career/life long approaches for countries to consider when strengthening their HPSD teacher work force, including the collaborative development of a a MOOCC (Massive, Online, Open Course, Content)
  • Recommendations to UN agencies on how indicators for Target 4.7 of the UN Goals can be improved on the basis of this real-world, systems-based, contextually sensitive approach.
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