Health Information in a Changing World: Practical Approaches for Teachers, Schools, and School Librarians

Synopsis

This holistic guide explains how school librarians and teachers can successfully integrate relevant health concepts and life skills throughout the curriculum for students K through 12.

• 15 original line drawings illustrating health issues, plus many images drawn from major image collections such as the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress

• Extensive bibliographies of material that can be used to teach health issues, including selected listings of major health textbooks used in the United States and Canada

• List of helpful selection aids and sources for online health information sites

Excerpt

Models for curriculum and instruction

As we discussed in Chapter 1, schools have long been involved in public health largely thorough their contact with large groups of children and their parents or caregivers. When children are sent to school, it carries an understanding that the school will be a safe haven from accident or illness and that if a child is hurt or becomes ill, that the child will be sent home. While parents may have less of an understanding that their children will learn about health, it is a part of the school’s curriculum in varying degrees at every level. What parents and caregivers may not consider is that the school has a certain responsibility to help them learn about health issues. in this chapter, we will consider the meaning of curricula, its base in theory, and how it and instruction are related in the goal to provide a full-service health learning agenda.

Curriculum has several practical bases, all of which have influenced how we as educators and school librarians think about our goals and missions. in a broad sense, curriculum is defined as “All the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the school.”

The first part of this chapter will briefly outline the four major models that have and continue to influence how educators, including school librarians and teachers, plan and deliver instruction and provide reliable health information to students and their caregivers. the second part will outline some useful instructional models and concepts.

Major curriculum ideas and the implications
for health school libraries

Mark Smith’s synthesis of some of the major curriculum theories and ideas are given in this section. These include the education curriculum: Education is transmission; the scientific curriculum: Education produces a product; the developmental . . .