Content
Discussion
Three Cornerstones
Your ongoing
learning and development in health promotion rests upon the same
three cornerstones that underlie any successful endeavour:
 the
will to grow and change
a sound plan
adequate resources
In this module,
the will to grow and change derives from a self-reflective practice;
the sound plan comes from understanding the capacities of health
promotion and assessing one's skill set against those capacities;
and building your store of resources comes from accessing a variety
of learning situations. The end point for this module is to identify
a few action steps which you can take to improve your skill set,
using accessible and effective resources, in a few areas about which
you deeply care.
Self-reflective
Practice: The First Cornerstone
Learning in
health promotion must blend where theory meets practice. In other
words, theories build models of how the world works, and therefore
suggest directions for action. At the same time, in the real world,
people do and learn things, which are often difficult to identify
and explain at first blush.
As Heine points
out, "If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much the
worse for the facts." Thus one can not be blinded by theory.
On the other hand, as Hegel pointed out, "Experience is a good
teacher, but the fees are high." Thus, one cannot let personal
experience trump accumulated wisdom in the health promotion literature.
The reflective
practitioner learns by applying theory to practice, and incorporating
lessons from practice into his/her theories, models and tools.
Schön (1983)
outlined a model which involved:
doing
and describing the experience
reviewing reactions
analyzing what happened
evaluating what happened
and learning from it
synthesizing and applying
what was learnt to the next situation
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