Health Educators

SAT., SEPT. 2, 1989, 7:00 AM
FARM, STUDY

In effect, you have “requested” this Teaching as a help in doing the presentation for your Retreat next weekend. You know this is not Our normal process, and, normally, I want you to wait in a quiet, meditative state for the theme and the Teaching I choose for you. But this is a somewhat reciprocal relationship, so occasionally I shall “honor your request.” This, o son, is one of these occasions.

As a professional department your central task is to prepare young people to be functioning health educators. As you already are writing, this is a task that is part science and part an art. As a department your influence on these students is only over a few years and then only partial. How they shall be as professionals is influenced by many factors other than your department, its people and its courses. This fact must be initially acknowledged.

This acknowledgment must lead you to know that the personality, character, and experiences of those coming into your program is important to your apparent success. Each applicant should be aware of and appreciate your interest in how they have developed as persons, how they have reacted to life experiences, and what they look forward to as a professional person.

In other words, you must have a major focus on humanizing and spiritualizing relationships with your majors and particularly those each of you faculty are assigned to advise. The ways in which you show students that you care about them will be an influence on how they care about persons with whom they associate as professionals. I want you to always favor and advocate the position that health education is more of a helping profession than just an educative one. Health should always be taught with concern for the learners… major concern.

Classes should be taught in human/spiritual ways. Mutual learning should be both advocated and displayed. Learners should help each other in the learning processes. And learners should be made aware of these techniques as they are experiencing them. Classes are not designed as therapy sessions, and you are educating, not counseling. And yet the nature of health education classes should be positive human experiences rather than merely opportunities to learn facts and ideas. And… the way a person is taught influences her approach to teaching when such opportunities arise and become part of her professional responsibility.

I call on you to continue to utilize and devise ways of encouraging learning. You advocate an holistic view of health. That can be made more believable if the actual class experiences are holistic… with concern for dimensions other than merely the intellectual.

Adaptability is one necessity for success in your profession. Continue to devise ways in which learners must be adaptable… and make them conscious of this objective. And, of course, you must continue to be adaptable, yourself. You shall have to consider, in these next few years, whether you shall stay with the comfortable courses you have now or whether you shall adapt and take on other challenging teaching tasks. I shall not advise you now, but shall just say that you should be teaching in those areas in which you can encourage the recognition of spirit as a part of health… an important dimension.

In some ways each of you faculty members must be a conscious role model for professionals in training. At the same time you must each be yourself, so that the strength of the department is in its diversity and differences. Yet one common criterion must be that whatever you do as educators should develop the health of learners… at least not be a detriment.