Learning Area Health Education 1

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2010:

This subject introduces teacher candidates to the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) strand, Physical, Personal and Social Learning and emphasises the role that health education plays in equipping secondary students with the knowledge and skills to take ownership of their personal health and wellbeing.

Teacher candidates will critically examine how definitions of ‘health’ are influenced by personal values and experiences, the media, public policy and school policies. They will explore the role of the teacher in helping school students to develop critical literacy around issues pertaining to their health and wellbeing and discuss the ways in which a socially just health curriculum functions as a tool for public health promotion.

Teacher candidates will be introduced to subject-specific requirements around programming, assessment and classroom management. They will also create a variety of teaching and learning resources including unit and lesson plans, assessment tasks and various health promotional teaching tools.

On completion of this subject, teacher candidates will be able to:

• Critically engage with the notion of health and the role that health educators play in fostering a whole-school approach to student wellbeing.
• Discuss a number of health-related issues that impact on the lives of young people both locally and globally and ask how these issues are relevant to the contemporary classroom.
• Identify, analyse and design suitable health education teaching resources that cater for the learning needs of students in years 7-10.
• Use planning and programming as strategies for managing the health education classroom.
• Identify specific learning needs of a variety of school student populations and devise strategies to ensure an inclusive, socially just, health promoting classroom.
• Explain a personal philosophy of teaching and learning that incorporates models and theories of health promotion.

There are 2 assessment tasks:

• Critical Essay (2500 words) due end of the semester (60%)
• Multimedia presentations and class seminars (1500 word equivalent) due throughout the semester as scheduled (40%)

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• Be skilled communicators who can effectively articulate and justify their practices as knowledgeable agents of change;
• Be flexible and able to adapt to change thorough knowing how to learn;
• Understand the significance of developing their practice on the basis of research evidence;
• Work in teams with skills in cooperation, communication and negotiation;
• Be independent of mind, responsible, resilient, self-regulating;
• Have a conscious personal and social values base.