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
