Healthy Teens, Healthy Schools

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.

In this book, Domine advocates for practices, programs, and interventions that would foster media literacy—specifically health literacy—among adolescent youth.  Using a social constructivist approach, Domine examines the historical connections among the adolescent youth culture, media technology, public health, and industrialization.  She analyzes data from various sources to summarize the health challenges that adolescent youth currently confront and shows how the health and health literacy of adolescents have been marginalized, co-opted, and failed by the entwined institutions of public education, business and industry, technology, and politics.  Her analysis of the commercialization and politicalization of youth health issues, such as federal school and breakfast programs and physical activity campaigns, is particularly enlightening.  Ultimately, the most important contribution of Domine’s work is her identification and description of effective adolescent health approaches and initiatives.  Professionals who focus on adolescent health within the disciplines of public health, health education, and health promotion can find a foundation for their work in this interesting book that illustrates holistic health education through school-community initiatives and innovative partnerships. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals and practitioners.

Vanessa Domine is associate professor in the Department of Secondary and Special Education at Montclair State University and the author of Rethinking Technology in Schools. She holds a doctorate in Media Ecology from New York University and is interested in how media and technology can support democratic practices in education.