IntroductionThis is a featured page

This wiki brings together the knowledge and experience that has been gained from decades of human development work. The school is a place or setting within the community that can promote health, equity, social development/cohesion, human rights, global understanding, safety and environmental citizenship as well as focus on learning, educational achievement and school effectiveness.

A health promoting, child-friendly school and similar whole school strategies such as effective schools, safe schools, community schools, open schools and eco-schools strives to have all facets of the school support the development of the whole child. School-based and school-linked programs should address the needs of all children, especially disadvantaged students. School feeding programs often serve as the central part of UN inter-agency development and emergencies programs in countries with low income or recovering epidemics, natural disasters and wars/internal conflicts. Other coordinated programs have been brought together to address HIV/AIDS, mental health or drug abuse.

This vast amount of knowledge and experience cannot be summarized in one endeavour, be it a text book, web site or wiki-based project, so we are embarked on a journey to use the new potential of the web in a linked set of web-based resources that have agreed to work together and to identify themselves as sharing a common denominator that promotes "schools for all", all students, all communities, all forms of human development.

Two of these new evidence-oriented wikis have been created on topics introduced in this wiki, namely School Substance Abuse Prevention and School Health Indicators (monitoring and reporting on the capacity of local programs and schools). We invite contributors to visit both of these wikis as part of their review of this one.

This wiki is focused on identifying and summarizing the key points that are common to these community-school strategies without trying to create yet another conceptual model of planning framework. Please read our Ten Key Points before going further into this wiki. Please add comments using the "Thread" feature at the bottom of that page.

Using those Ten Key Points as an organizer for this wiki, we have then listed many concepts that help to explain these ten key points. Each of these concepts represents a body of knowledge and experience in working with schools. (For more about these concepts and a better understanding oh how we identified these twn points, read the attachments found at the bottom of this page. Tey are taken from an extensive review of the research on school health promotion and other forms of whole school-community approaches to human development that was done in 2006.)

Based on these concepts and a review of much of the research evidence found in meta-analyses, landmark studies and reports, Campbell, Cochrane and other systematic reviews and a variety of other sources, we have begun to identify Good or Promising Practices. These practices have been identified by leading scholars, practitioners and knowledge broker organizations in school health, education and health. (often the source of the described best practice is identified in parentheses) (Note: Such good practices are too often defined only at the school level or for educators only, thereby neglecting the foundation role that school boards/ authorities and governments as well as nonj education sectors must play if the school-level changes are to be sustainable. Consequently, we have listed these practices at these levels, including government/ministries, local school boards/Agencies and schools/neighbourhoods.)

Our draft lists of these key concepts and good/promising practices are presented in the Table of Contents of this wiki.
We ask contributors to this wiki to review that Table of Contents and either amend it on the page by using the "edit tool" (found at the top of the page) or by adding a "Thread" of Commentary (found at the bottom).

Also, we ask contributors to read more About this Wiki, our One Page Summary, Definition of Terms and Guidelines for Contributing to this Wiki.

We then ask contributors to focus in on the pages that are of particular interest to them. In this initial consultative stage we ask contributors to simply identify content or potential contributors on that topic. (You can simply add those suggestions onto the page by using the "edit tool". Or you can add a comment (Thread) on how that topic could be developed.


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dmccall
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Word Document Introduction to a Review of Research Supporting A Systems Approach to School Health Promotion.doc (Word Document - 532k)
posted by dmccall   Apr 6 2008, 11:11 AM EDT
This introduction is taken from an extensive review of research on school health and other whole school-community approaches to human development done for the Canadian Council on Learning in 2006. A full copy is available from dmccall@cash-aces.ca
Word Document What we Know about School Health Promotion.doc (Word Document - 876k)
posted by dmccall   Jul 13 2007, 4:24 PM EDT
A Summary from the same research review as above, prepared by D McCall Canadian Association for School Health