Usefulness of a Health Education and Promotion Book Club to Teach About Race and Social Justice

Emphasizing the value of utilizing both facts and stories to teach and learn about health, race, and social justice, this reflection makes a case for using The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health to create a dialogue with undergraduate health education students. The unique combination of facts and stories that the two books provide sparked conversations from which both my students and I were grateful to learn.

Creating healthful cultures through Critical Creativity

During Covid lockdown in 2021, I was invited to offer a masterclass to masters students at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh: ‘In the leadership module we have a masterclass, groupwork, study time and a plenary that ties together. We even have a book club!!! The aim is to be generic, not nursing/health focused. The learners make space to consider application in their own areas/specialisms. ‘We were wondering if you would like to/could do a masterclass within the strand of healthfulness. We really value your storytelling and know you are really passionate about healthfulness from an ecological perspective. We would love it if you could draw on your experiences of politics, environment... The more creative the better. ‘We would want learners to consider their role in creating healthful cultures and ways that they might go about it.’ How could I resist, given my decades-long passion for transformational practice development and inquiry within a critical creativity landscape in health and social care? In my retirement, I have continued to work successfully in this way in a variety of contexts, including political activism. I responded: ‘I would love to show how healthful cultures can be created, with stories from my person-centred community engagement work in creating a neighbourhood plan [for 21st century local housing development] and campaigning for positive personal and community political responses to the climate and ecological emergency. Stories that show up something of how conditions can be created to enable the ecology of human flourishing to be embodied in action. Also, how I am seeing the stirrings of transformative change in local politics that have previously been very traditional in the way they work with people.’ This article is based on that webinar, because students not only enjoyed it, but we heard that some were also able to transfer the learning to their different professional contexts. Therefore, for this paper, I repurposed and elaborated the material for a wider audience. Health and social care services are increasingly offered in new ways in the community and I imagine more health and social care professionals will be setting up innovative ways of working. I hope, therefore, that sharing my experience of creating cultures where everyone flourishes by doing things differently, as well as critically and creatively with the whole self, will be helpful. I will share four stories of how I do that in a variety of contexts and show you, through images and metaphors, how I have gone about that, first in health and social care but primarily for now in political and campaigning contexts. Through the stories, I will show you what it takes as a person to create healthful cultures. Woven through the article is an introduction to critical creativity and its three mandalas. They are there for you to look at with soft eyes/letting the words wash over you – without digging into meaning at this point. My hope is that you begin to get a sense of where the mandalas fit into the stories and, if you so choose, into your own stories and practice. The parts of the mandalas are italicised in the text as they are mentioned.

Strategies for Promoting a Reading Culture Among Secondary School Students in Kiambu County, Kenya

This research looked at reading culture within secondary school students in Kiambu County. It discussed the role that teachers, parents, school librarians and school culture play in the promotion of a reading culture or lack thereof. The specific objectives were; to determine the status of reading culture being promoted by secondary schools and to determine the level of usage of school libraries and their resources to support the development and cultivation of culture of reading among high school learners among secondary school students. This research was based on Lee Vygotsky’s cultural historical theory of cognitive development. The study employed descriptive survey design. The target population was 240 students, 24 teachers and 12 librarians from 12 secondary schools within Kiambu County. This research used stratified random sampling. The data was collected using self-administered questionnaires. Through pretest of the questionnaires and subsequent re-modelling, validity of the findings was enhanced. The data collected was analyzed through the aid of Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS). The analyzed data is displayed using charts, graphs, diagrams, tables, frequency tables, matrices, drawings or block diagrams. A significant portion of students loved reading very much at 31%. The hours spent on reading also varied with students (34%) 3-4 hours a day reading, with 30% others spending more than 4 hours a day. All the institutions featured have libraries. Out of the 208 students, 44% use the library hour to read either in class or the library. 20% of others use the allocated hour for private studies. Most of the students (78%) stated being part of a book club or study group. For instance, the study found that out of the 187 students (78%), a significant proportion (49%) used the groups for academic performance. Others benefited through fluency in language, increased vocabulary, better writing, and reading skills, among other reasons. The study proves the popular notion that Kenya's schools and the country have a poor reading culture. Students are forced into reading either by teachers and parents or pressured by the need to pass exams. As such, the most read materials are school textbooks and novels, which also happen to be the most stocked materials in school libraries. Reading should be a personal initiative as opposed to being forced into it. That being the case, students' opinions matter more on making reading more fun and appealing. Therefore, in addition to the importance of school libraries and reading clubs, schools need to encourage peer motivation to read in an effort to improve reading culture. Some of the study recommendations are that there is a need to include an opinion on academic experts on reading culture, government, and parents who play a significant role in the education sector.

Book, Image, and Social Presence

In the early 1920s, the literary editor Sidney Clark wrote about English classic texts as moral guides for new readers. In 1932, Q. D. Leavis bemoaned the growth of popular fiction as simple escape. More positive overall was the growth of books as constructions of word and image, not just through illustrations but in all aspects of design, layout and increasingly through pictorial dust jackets in books of all kinds. Design of covers and binding revealed much about contents, with the Left Book Club and its rival Right Book Club the most extreme, declaring their content and political stance. In new homes, books became a way of presenting the owners’ tastes to visitors; the design of Penguin Books in particular made purchasing easier and cheaper, and also offered books of many kinds, identifiable by colour-coded covers, to new readers.