The background for the project is shaped by two major concerns: societal concerns over young people’s health and body dissatisfaction, and concerns for curriculum renewal where a new cross curricular theme ‘Public Health and Life Skills’ (PHLS) is introduced in school.

The ‘Literacies for Health and Life Skills’ (HLS) project aims to develop and implement a new didactic approach that will enable pre-service teachers to facilitate the development of young people’s health and life skills. The project will examine how pre-service teachers learn to teach different forms of critical literacies and how the teaching of these literacies at the lower secondary level might enhance pupils’ health and life skills.

HLS proposes a practice-oriented collaboration project that directly intervenes in the new five-year teacher education programme for the lower secondary level (GLU 5–10).

Through our focus on a new cross-curricular theme introduced in schools, we will shed light on learning across school subjects. HLS will study new teaching methods and exploratory forms of teaching and learning. The project also addresses how variation in background factors and psychosocial environments affect young people’s health, well-being, and life skills.

The project is developed and will be conducted in collaboration with our research partners; Norges idrettshøgskole, New Mexico State University and University of Strathclyde Glasgow.

We will also collaborate with several partner schools in Norway to complete the project. Our partner schools are a variety of lower secondary schools that has agreed to be a part of the project.

Our research focuses on:

• Youths’ health, well-being, and life skills
• Critical literacy and notions of health
• Critical multimodal literacies for PHLS
• Critical movement literacies for PHLS
• Teaching PHLS during school practicum
• PHLS´s impact on pupils’ health and well-being

To read the Norwegian summary, click here.