Researching School Enablement in Rural Communities: A Global Challenge

• In Event: Schools as Enabling Spaces to Improve Learning and Health Outcomes in Rural South Africa — Part 1

Abstract

"This paper sets out the conceptual framework for the research and symposium. In this research how children’s quality learning is constructed and supported in schools is grounded in a social-ecological interpretation of human development. This theoretical lens presupposes a process-oriented, ‘person x environment’ model of learning (i.e., indispensable interaction between person and environment). This model encapsulates the ways in which policy, sociocultural (i.e., community-related), organisational (i.e., school leadership, culture and professional capacity), social and relational (within and between schools, families and communities), and intellectual (e.g. integrated curriculum and pedagogy, teacher collective efficacy) environments play in nurturing (or hindering) the development of children’s capabilities, values, and skills to make healthy, informed choices about their own lives.

Existing health education research tends to treat schools’ physical, social and emotional climate as a given setting (or ‘environment’) in which individual-focussed health interventions are implemented (e.g. DePetris & Eames, 2018; Hunt et al., 2015; Shackleton et al., 2016). This research, however, will offer a more nuanced conceptual lens to understand how learning and health outcomes can be substantially improved in some schools, but not others, in communities that share similar socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. A distinctive feature of our methodology is to build on, and extend, research-informed knowledge about what successful schools (especially those serving socioeconomically disadvantaged communities) do to accelerate student learning and wellbeing. This is an often overlooked missing link in scaling-up research on education and health innovations.

However, as the research evidence strongly suggests, system-wide scaling up education campaigns need to recognise how intervention tasks, organisational factors (especially school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a whole-child learning climate), diverse contextual conditions, and social conditions and resources in larger communities combine to create variability in outcomes (Bryk, 2009 & 2015; also Bryk et al., 2010; Engestrὄm, 2011; Gu et al., 2019; Gutiėrrez & Penuel, 2014; Leithwood, 2019). Given this premise, a key consideration in this research is to refine school-community collaborative health education approaches in ways that they interact with (i.e. integrated and embedded), rather than add to (i.e. as discrete, add-on components) (Bryk, 2015; Gu et al., 2018), the complex classroom, curriculum and school systems.

The research will use a connected difference theory (CDT) of social innovation (Mulgan, 2007) to guide the development and evaluation of the collaborative health education model. CDT has three key components that are relevant to the interdisciplinary nature of this research: i) understanding existing elements and how they impact on outcomes of interest; ii) cutting across organisational, sectoral and disciplinary boundaries to create new, connected insights; and iii) providing a legacy of sustained and compelling relationships crucial to embedding new developments."

Authors

• Qing Gu, University College London Institute of Education

• Liesel Ebersohn, University of Pretoria

• Patrick Callaghan, London South Bank University

• Martin Mills, QUT

• Rupert J. Higham, University College London

• Lynn Ang, Institute of Education - London

• Jolene Skordis- Worrall, Queensland University of Technology