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Global Working Group on Health Literacy/Life Skills/Social Inclusion
In 2018, the FRESH Partners 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). A core subject in Health & Life (Living) Skills (often called Health & Well-Being or Personal, Social & Health Education) was the primary focus among the array of HPSD promoting subjects that include Home Economic and Physical education as well as others such as Moral & Religious education and aspects of literature, the arts, science education and others. The Working Group gathered an extensive amount of research, better practices and insights from over 70 experts and practitioners to frame health, personal & social development education that includes Health & Life Skills education and curricula. These included defining H&LS curricula as a combination of health, safety and daily living/social & emotional/relationship skills (which are different that the transferable skills often discussed in relation to employment), positioning H&LS education within a broad set of learning domains, cross-curricular competencies and other core subjects such as home economics/family studies, physical education and moral/spiritual and religious education. Important issues such as minimum curriculum/instructional time, defining and using generic skills, attitudes and knowledge in curriculum design, expanded use of extended or extra-curricular learning programs and clarifying terms such as life skills and well0being were identified. Between 2018 and 2021, the FRESH Working Group on Health Literacy, Life Skills & Social Inclusion worked with over 70 experts to organize several web meetings and publish concept notes defining the scope of education promoting HSPSSD, health literacy, life skills/social & emotional learning, critical thinking, digital & media literacy, extended (extra-curricular) learning activities, relevant behaviour theories, curriculum coherence and long term workforce development planning for teachers and others The next phase of the WG will build on those findings as well as that of an International Research Network established within the World Education Research Association. This network suggested that a minimum literacy level (basic knowledge, skills, access, support) be used in curriculum design rather than the traditional lengthy listing of optimal learning objectives for selected topics be used. This requires research to define the minimal vs optimal student learning objectives for each topic, consideration of the instructional time needed (estimated at 5-10 hours per grade when covering the topic) and clarity on the instructional time defined in the HWB/HLS curriculum. This in-depth research will help us better understand that can be realistically achieved in high, low and conflict/disaster affected countries through their core curricual. The second phase of the FRESH Working Group/Research Network will use the curriculum documents collected by members of the Global Network of Deans of Education to answer these fact-finding questions:
As part of Phase Two, the WH will examine the recent UNESCO/UNICEF initiative in strong Foundations Health & Well-Being education in primary schools Phase One 2018-2022 The WG addressed 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. An important part of the FRESH WG process included a Canadian/global project on preventing violent extremism. This sub-set of activities created a research/knowledge development agenda (see the working draft/outline) on how several strategies and programs promoting social inclusion can be adapted and combined to prevent violent extremism, alienation, violence and other anti-social behaviours. The advice from this WG 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 started 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 began in January 2018 and was conducted over several months primarily through on-line and web-based activities. The goal of the project was 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 included:
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Recorded web meetings
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Reports/Papers/Concept Notes
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