Canadian Council on Learning | Conseil Canadien sur l'Apprentissage

Work Group Summaries

Work Group 1:

Early Childhood Health and Learning

Located at Camosun College’s School of Health and Human Services, this work group aims to provide research and recommendations to the Health and Learning Knowledge Centre and the Canadian Council on Learning on the topic of Early Childhood Health and Learning.

While addressing HLKC’s three main themes, Health Literacy, Healthy Communities and Capacity Building, this work group serves to accomplish the following activities and projects: Environmental Scan Updates, Learning Stories, Lessons in Learning reports, consultation with other Early Childhood Work Groups.

For more information, please contact Anita Ferriss at ferriss@camosun.bc.ca.

Work Group 2a:

School-age Children through Schools

Work Group 2a focuses on the health and learning of school-age children and youth in the school setting. It is the point of reference for school-health promotion in Canada.

Work Group 2a takes an evidence-based approach to school health that is holistic in terms of the whole child (as opposed to single health issues), that integrates health, learning and social development, and that recognizes the need to create the infrastructural foundation to sustain school-health programs. Its activities include producing:

• A research review and discussion paper on how schools can ensure that all students achieve a basic level of health literacy by identifying evidence-based policies, programs and practices that will help provide equitable access to school-health education.
• A position paper on the indicators and data sources required to measure and monitor school-health policies and programs.
• A report comparing Canada’s national and provincial/territorial capacity to promote health and learning through schools.
• The facilitation of ongoing knowledge exchange and dissemination.

For more information, please contact Doug McCall at dmccall@cash-aces.ca.

Work Group 2c:

Dissemination to the School-age Children and Youth Sector School Health Bulletin (Canadian Teachers' Federation)

Work Group 2c is made up of the Canadian Teachers' Federation, the Canadian Public Health Association and the Canadian Association for School Health. The goal of this group is to produce a Specialist Teachers Journal and Public Health Inserts for the CPHA journal. These will be published three times a year and will be distributed to all schools in Canada as well as all members of the work group’s associations.

For more information, please contact Doug McCall at dmccall@cash-aces.ca.

Work Group 2e:

Networking and Outreach (School-age Children and Youth)

Work Group 2e collaborated with Work Group 2c to create a distribution list of contact persons and networks for the dissemination of Health and Learning Knowledge Centre information and publications concerning school-age children and youth. This network of contacts will also be used to distribute calls for articles, to entice people to be part of the network of information exchange and to serve as a support to all those organizations and individuals who are part of the network.

For more information, please contact Doug McCall at dmccall@cash-aces.ca.

Work Group 3:

Out-of-School

Research is increasingly showing that the informal and non-formal learning that children experience after the school day in communities, youth organizations, recreation programs and other facilities has a significant impact on their health and educational outcomes.

For more information, please contact Joan Wharf Higgins, jwharfhi@uvic.ca.

Work Group 4:

Health Literacy: Youth Engagement Strategy! (HL YES!)

Work Group 4 aims to study how youth are engaged in health-literacy projects. It has two main activities: the Grey Knowledge Interviews and the Anti-Dote Project/Research Component.

The Grey Knowledge Interviews project is a compilation of 40 to 50 interviews with key informants from across Canada involved in youth outreach projects relevant to media-arts and health literacy. The purpose is to provide an in-depth scan of the projects and to evaluate their effectiveness, viability and constraints. The Anti-Dote Project is collecting data and analyzing research as to the engagement of the Anti-Dote Project.

For more information, please contact Alison Preece at apreece@uvic.ca.

Work Group 5:

Young Adults Work Group

Coordinated by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, the fifth work group addresses youth ages 18 to 34 years old. It provides leadership and support to this demographic through knowledge exchange and by providing information to organizations that support this sector of youth.

The activities conducted by Work Group 5 include ongoing environmental scan updates, where new information about health and learning challenges of young adults will be shared. Ongoing knowledge exchange activities will provide periodic updates of health and learning for young adults through conferences, meetings and workshops. A report on data indicators will review the work of other organizations and pull together a list of data sources on the health of young adults. Communications and dissemination of information is an activity of this work group that will provide articles and materials on young adults. This information is shared with all members of HLKC. Finally, this work group will have a roundtable with policy makers, the Canadian Council on Learning and HLKC in 2008 in order to review its research and reports.

For more information, please contact Terry Anne Boyles at taboyles@accc.ca.

Work Group 6:

Adult Working Group

The Adult Working Group, operating out of Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, looks at promoting health and learning for adults in the workplace, in health care settings, among families and in communities. More specifically, this group will look at how health and learning affect adults with low levels of literacy skills, adults living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants and refugees and remote communities.

The activities of this work group include consultation with the aforementioned groups and reports on the findings, ongoing environmental scans, state-of-the-field reports, data monitoring and reporting, capacity-building for relevant organizations and communities and knowledge mobilization through conferences and workshops.

For more information, please contact Allan Quigley at aquigley@stfx.ca or Helene Gregoire,  helenegregoire@hotmail.com.

Work Group 7:

Aging Well – Older Adult Working Group

Work Group 7, facilitated by CATALIST, studies the healthy development and learning of older adults in their various settings—specifically workplaces, recreation centres, educational institutions and health-care services. It seeks to share its findings through a wide range of forums, meetings and consultations, as well as via print, e-mail, websites and other media. It is currently working on developing case studies on sustaining healthy communities of learning and will be hosting an Aging Well Conference on Capacity Building.

For more information, please contact Kerrie Strathy at Kerrie.strathy@uregina.ca.

Work Group 8:

Expert Panel on Health Literacy –
Canadian Public Health Association

Work Group 8 is the Expert Panel on Health and Literacy, created in 2006 by the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) with funding from HLKC. The panel’s mandate is to provide advice on the state of knowledge on health literacy and the effectiveness of interventions to improve health literacy and to generate recommendations for future research, policy and programming initiatives to facilitate health literacy. The panel’s report and key recommendations are due to be released in the Fall 2007. This work group also has an outreach strategy to promote the understanding of health literacy to several key audiences.

For more information, please contact Suehsimson@cpha.ca Sullivan at ssullivan@cpha.ca

Work Group 9:

Other Voices

The Other Voices Work Group actively engages marginalized populations in order to learn about barriers and challenges to their access to health and learning. This demographic includes people dealing with poverty, homelessness, sex work, addictions, mental health and low literacy. Work Group 9 organized an Other Voices Forum in October 2006 in Vancouver where speakers having had direct experience with the aforementioned issues discuss the barriers that continue to marginalize them. The forum resulted in an exchange of information and a step towards capacity building among marginalized populations. It also resulted in the organizing of a second forum to be held in October 2007 in Halifax.

For more information, please contact Barb Smith at barbjsmith@shaw.ca.

Work Group 10:

Health Human Resource Capacity Building for Health Literacy – Education Strategies for Health Professionals

Work Group 10 aims to develop a model for building capacity among health professionals, health authorities, agencies and educational institutions. It works to facilitate the exchange of best-practices information and to disseminate this information amongst its contacts of health and education providers across the country.

For more information, please contact Lorna Romilly at lromilly@telus.net.

Work Group 11a:

Community-based Research

The purpose of Work Group 11a is to provide support for community-based and practice-driven research in health and learning. It monitors the state of the field, addresses knowledge gaps, documents new research, provides a venue for researchers to network, and promotes best practices in community-based research.

For more information, please contact Tom Whalley at whalleyt@douglas.bc.ca.

Work Group 11b:

Documentation Centres

Conducted through the Centre for Community Health Promotion Research (CCHPR) at the University of Victoria, Work Group 11b is dedicated to creating equitable conditions for health by generating knowledge based on the interrelationship of theory, practice, policy, education and community-based research. It then uses this knowledge to engage policy-makers, community members, practitioners and researchers.

For more information, please contact Amanda Jeffery at ajeffery@uvic.ca.