Life of Cy: pre-service teachers’ perceptions of 21st century influences on adolescents’’ health and well-being.

Abstract

Global influences on young people's thinking and behaviour have implications for their mental, physical and social health, and amongst adolescent school-students a plethora of beliefs, attitudes and group-think have significant - and often misunderstood - influences on the way they think and behave (Kroger, 2004; Nayak & Kehily, 2008). To recognise and acknowledge the meaning and characteristics of youth health and wellbeing in the early 21st century is particularly important for secondary school health education teachers. Although traditional areas of health education, such as drugs and alcohol education, sexuality education, mental health education and food and nutrition continue to have an important place in student learning, it is clear that the health issues emerging for children and young people today require a more critically informed perspective on how to educate school students about health. In 2011, as material for a course assessment - and as data for the research study discussed here - student teachers were asked to engage in informal conversation with at least one teenager about his / her interests, beliefs, activities, and key influences on their choices and actions. The student teachers were asked to then analyse and discuss their impressions of contemporary teenage worlds. Broadly, the professional purpose of the assessment task was to instigate in the student teachers a heightened curiosity about and interest in teenagers, but the development of critical health literacy in the student teachers was also looked for, in data. By providing them with an opportunity to develop currency with the trends, fads and practices that define teenagers' realities, the student teachers' recognition of underpinning, wider societal effects on teenage populations' health and safety was extended. Participants exhibited a growing critical awareness of social networking and Internet communications as social determinants of health for young people. A developing critical consciousness was demonstrated in their analyses of the conversations, and evidenced through their identification of the role and place of technology in defining social status, social norms, and changes in communication and power relations for teenagers; the participants were also able to envisage implications of these broader influences for their own futures, as health education teachers.