Healthy Teens, Healthy Schools

Abstract

Widespread obesity, poor nutrition, sleep-deprivation, and highly digital and sedentary lifestyles are just a few of the many challenges facing young people. Although public schools in the United States have the potential for meeting these challenges on a mass scale, they are slow to respond. The emphasis on discrete subject areas and standardized test performance offers little in the way of authentic learning and may in reality impede health. Healthy Teens, Healthy Schools: How Media Literacy Education can Renew Education in the United States reframes health education as a complex terrain that resides within a larger ecosystem of historical, social, political, and global economic forces. It calls for a media literate pedagogy that empowers students to be critical consumers, creative producers, and responsible citizens. This book illustrates holistic health education through school-community initiatives and innovative partnerships that are successful in magnifying all curriculum subjects and their associated teaching practices. Vanessa Domine offers teachers, teacher educators, school administrators, community organizers, public health professionals, and policy makers with a transmedia and transdisciplinary educational approach to adolescent health to demonstrate how our collective focus on cultivating healthy teens will ultimately yield healthy schools.