South Australian Union Awards

Jennifer Fane & Shelley Pezy - WAC Reps

In follow up to my last blog post about the NTEU Women's Action Committee's Bluestocking week, Shelley Pezy and I were extremely honoured to accept an award on behalf of the NTEU at the Annual SA Union Awards Night last Friday at the Adelaide Oval. Bluestocking week (a week long series of events held in August celebrating women in higher education) won the award for Best Example of Women's Activism. We are extremely proud of the recognition for our event received and feel that Bluestocking week did make strong contribution to women's activism and the fight against domestic violence.

The SA Union Awards night was a fantastic event and an excellent chance to celebrate the work of Unions and their members across South Australia. The WAC and the NTEU look forward to another year of activism - thank you for your support!

Jennifer Fane - SA Union award - Women's Activism

Blue Stocking Week South Australia

Jennifer Fane - Blue Stocking Week South Australia

This year in South Australia we've had an amazing Blue Stocking Week that is sadly coming to an end. With are largest event finished, I'd like to take a moment to share some of the highlights as well as promote our final event happening tomorrow here at Flinders University.

Last night we had a Blue Stocking Week dinner in the city where we sold out with over 70 guests in attendance. The dinner was both a celebration of Blue Stocking Week, as well as a fundraiser for the  Working Women's Centre. Our guest speaker, Heather Margrisen is a passionate speaker and tireless advocate against domestic violence who shared her experiences and work in Domestic Violence Education with us. Domestic Violence has been an important issues for the NTEU during bargaining this year and this was an opportunity to celebrate the work being done, as well as an important reminder of the work still left to do. The dinner was a fantastic success and I'd like to thank all those who came out to support our cause.

Tomorrow is our final SA Blue Stocking Week event which is a lunch held on the Flinders campus at the Scholars Lounge at 1pm. Jeannie Rae, president of the NTEU, will be chairing the event which includes our guest speaker Khadija Gbla, an outstanding and celebrated public speaker on women's issues. We hope you can join us if you're on campus tomorrow for the free event.

Finally, I would like to highlight another Blue Stocking Week initiative called We are the women of the university past, present and future where we are asking women to share their stories as women of the university. If you'd like to submit your story, or read the stories women have submitted please take a look at the NTEU Blue Stocking Week  page.

Blue Stocking Week 2014 - Jennifer Fane

 

Upcoming Bluestocking Week events in Adelaide

With Bluestocking week quickly approaching I wanted to share an invite for all my colleagues in South Australia to join us in celebrating women in education. Please share with anyone interested in joining us.

Dear colleague,

We are Shelley Pezy and Jennifer Fane and we are your representatives on the NTEU’s Women’s Action Committee.

Shelley has worked in a professional role at the University of Adelaide and been an active union member for 25 years. Jennifer is a lecturer in education at Flinders University who has recently arrived in Australia and has continued her long standing union involvement with her appointment to the Women’s Action Committee.

Every year NTEU members hold Blue Stocking Week, a celebration of women’s participation and achievements in higher education and an opportunity to focus on issues that matter to women.

This year, your union is hosting a fund-raising dinner for the Working Women’s Centre on Wednesday 13th August at 7pm. The dinner will be hosted by Janet Giles, immediate past Secretary of SA Unions, and will feature guest speaker Heather Margrison, coordinator of Moving Forward - a support group for women who have survived domestic violence.

The dinner will be held upstairs at Lemongrass Bistro, 289 Rundle Street, Adelaide. Tickets cost $40 each and can be booked or online here.

We hope you will be able to join us for an enjoyable evening.

Yours in solidarity,

Shelley Pezy & Jennifer Fane
NTEU Women's Action Committee

Latest Publication

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09581596.2014.935703#.U8cXrB2ylyI

Sharing my latest publication entitled: How can we increase children's understanding of the social determinants of health? Why charitable drives in school reinforce individualism, responsibilisation and inequity. It has been published online in Critical Public Health and will be appearing in print in due time.

The article explores the way in which schools engage young children social inequities and suggests alternative ways of teaching and engagement that uphold social justice and work towards health equity.

Here is the abstract of those further interested:

This paper examines the ways in which neoliberal responses to social health issues shape the educational discourses and practices of schools. As schools are increasingly identified as ideal spaces for health promotion, the question of how and why educators and public health practitioners can and should work together continues to be debated. Using Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction, we use this indicative example of emergency food to examine how ‘charity alone’ models reproduce and perpetuate inequitable health outcomes in neoliberal societies. This individualistic view of health continues to work against public health and social justice education initiatives increasingly found in schools, curricula and wider society; creating a dissonance between rhetoric and reality. Revolutionary critical pedagogies are explored to examine the implications of these practices in schools, and how the framework of service learning may offer an approach for involving primary students in empathy,caring and social justice. We seek to extend the existing literature by exploring ways of shifting, rather than reproducing, the current practices of educators and public health practitioners in how children experience health inequality and the social determinants of health.

The article can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09581596.2014.935703#.U8cXrB2ylyI

A Social View of Health for Pre-Service teachers: Inquiry Projects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IzLNBtWu8

This is the second year I have taught the Foundations of Health Education (HLPE 1540) here at Flinders University to first year pre-service teachers. During 2013, my colleague Grant Banfield and I started a research project to investigate how our topic helped students develop a social view of health (see prior blog post from the AARE conference for further details). This year in response to the findings of our ongoing research project, we introduced a new component to the topic - an Inquiry Project.

The Inquiry Project required students to work in groups to explore a social issue that has health consequences for specific community and/or identified group of people. Once a social issue had been identified, they were to become actively engaged in an activity or community initiative that is directed to address the issue and its health consequences. A the end of the semester, they were to present an educative representation of their exploration and engagement to fellow Flinders University students.

The assignment was purposefully open ended. It required students to take initiative and involve themselves in a social health issue and present their learning from the project and how it has helped them to understand what good health education is. The last two lectures of the semester were spent  having students present their Inquiry Projects, and share their learning on a social health issue and the responses to it from a local, national, and/or international standpoint. Our over 150 students become involved in social health issues such as homelessness, food security, community gardens, mental health awareness, community swaps, sexual health education, and much more.

The presentations were well done and through their assessment tasks student's reported high levels of learning from their projects. When compared to the previous year, student's understanding of a social view of health  was clearly augmented through  'hands on' involvement in a social health. The Inquiry Projects greatly helped students to understand the social nature of health and how it ties into what good health education might look like in classrooms, schools, and the greater community.

From a teaching standpoint, it has been exciting to see students grasps topic content more meaningfully. However, from a health educator standpoint, the really exciting part is watching students move from a narrow and individualistic view of health to a broader view that encompasses social issues and grapples with what might be needed to address them.

I'd like to finish off this post with an example of one of the Inquiry Projects by a group of my students who created a mental health awareness video (link). It's a beautiful example of the work being done here by health students at Flinders University and something that should be seen by the widest audience possible.

NTEU's Women's Action Committee National Meeting

Jennifer Fane - NTEU Flinders Newsletter

Flinders Branch Newsletter March 2014

please see link for full newsletter http://www.nteu.org.au/library/view/id/4972

I have recently been appointed as the Academic staff representative to the National Tertiary Education Union's Women Action Committee (WAC). I travelled to Melbourne this week to take part in the national WAC meeting which happens twice yearly at the NTEU national office.

The WAC is committed to making the voice of women in the union heard. Not just for 'women's issues' but as a voice for issues which concern all members of the union and the greater body of our colleagues within our Universities. Our meeting focused on pressing issuing currently being addressed in our Enterprise agreements and within the larger context of our workplaces. Key areas of conversation were the Domestic Violence Leave provisions, Anti-bullying culture, and Indigenous matters.

My fellow South Australian representative Shelley Pezy and I will have a report featured in the NTEU SA branch's next newsletter which I will post when published. I found the meeting to be an excellent opportunity to address some of the extremely pressing issues happening within Universities, the NTEU, and within the greater Australian society. I am looking forward to growing in my role as an advocate for the voice of women within the Union and the University sector in South Australia.

Recent Publication - Promoting School Health? A Case for the Use of Interprofessional Education within Teacher Education programs to support Health Promoting Schools

The conference proceedings for the 2013 Australian Teacher Education Association's national conference have been published online. I presented a paper entitled Promoting School Health? A Case for the Use of Interprofessional Education within Teacher Education programs to support Health Promoting Schools which includes some of my current research into the Health Promoting School model and a pilot project between myself and a Police Training Institute in Canada.

This is a research area I am keenly interested in, and quite integral to the current degree, Masters of Science by Research, that I am completing. Here's an excerpt of the pilot project - which features myself and the Justice Institute of BC:


Kindergarten and the Cop
An example of IPE within a K-7 Canadian school and Police 
Training Institute – June 2012: 

A School Liaison Officers (SLO) is a Police Officer who is assigned to a
school or school district whose goals are to foster socially
responsible behaviour in children and youth, goals which are best
met when “trusting, respectful and positive relationships are
established between students, school staff, and police”
(NewWestminster-Police 2012).
These positive relationships are meant to be established through
classroom visits, school assemblies, and the general presence of
SLOs within schools. As a classroom teacher, while I have great
appreciation for bringing community members into my classroom
and helping my students to make connections with people outside
the traditional school environment, SLO visits were extremely
challenging to manage. These challenges were due to the lack of
communication and collaboration between SLO and the classroom
teacher, and the difficulties the officer had in tailoring content and
message appropriate for a class of junior primary students.
In the interest of strengthening interprofessional collaborations
within my school, I contacted the instructor, Constable Foley* of the
School Liaison Office training course at the Justice Institute of British
Columbia and asked what sort of training SLOs receive before they
are posted within schools. Const. Foley (an Officer and former SLO
himself) said that the training encourages SLO to use cooperative
teaching with classroom teachers as a means to support student
learning, marrying the expertise in the field of SLOs with the
teaching and learning expertise of teachers. While this is a suggested
strategy, he suggested that one of the biggest barriers for SLOs to
employ a cooperative teaching approach is a lack of understanding
in how to interact interprofessionaly with teachers. The lack of
communication across interprofessional boundaries is evident
within SLO literature, and remains a major obstacle to achieving
their mandate(Lambert, Lambert et al. 2002).  Another barrier
identified was a lack of primary specific content within the SLO
training course do to a lack of expertise on primary education at the
Justice Institute.
To try to address the knowledge gap that was affecting students in
schools, I ran an afternoon workshop during the SLO training course
designed to give SLOs an understanding of appropriate teaching
techniques, management strategies, and content areas appropriate
to support health and wellbeing in junior primary settings. The
workshop also included strategies for approaching teachers to
teacher cooperative in classroom settings.
After the workshop, the instructor received extremely positive
feedback from the participants about the inclusion of primary
teaching pedagogy in the course and participants reported increased
confidence in their abilities in early learning settings.

If you're interested in reading the paper, here's the link to the ATEA website where it can be downloaded. Enjoy!

http://atea.edu.au/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=132&view=summary&cid=752&catid=97