‘Literacies for Health and Life Skills’ (HLS)The background for this project is shaped by two major concerns: societal concerns over youngpeople’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 combines theoretical perspectives from literacy studies (Mills, 2016) and activist didactics (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). The overall methodological approach to the HLS project is action research. 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). The project is developed and will be conducted in collaboration with our partner schools where the students will conduct their school practicum and teach PHLS. The action research approach will produce longitudinal data on pre-service teachers’ competence development. The research approach will be supplemented by several data-gathering methods: life-mode interviews, visual methods, video observations, solicited journals, and a mixed-method approach that involves a quasi-experiment testing how the new didactic approach affects the pupils’ health and life skills. HLS is organised into four work packages and includes two Ph.D. projects.