Katherine's initial reflections

Here are my initial thoughts for the first week of class...

I'm principally interested in adolescent health because I find adolescents a completely fascinating group.  They are as emotionally and intellectually complex as adults, but sometimes have the hardy resilience of a young child or the sensitive fragility of someone much older.  I think health promotion per se is interesting in this population because so much of what we do with adolescents generally deals more proscriptively and in terms of what you should NOT be doing and how you should NOT act.  Teenagers need more messages in their lives -- positive, health messages, not necessarily any messages -- that are about what you CAN do and what is GOOD to do.  

My focus in school is in policy, and I want to focus on health education.  I'm hoping to get a good foundation in solid on-the-ground strategies that can be used effectively in adolescent populations.  I have my own experience with adolescents, but I want to learn more about generalizable practices that can eventually be extrapolated out to the policy level.  That way, down the line I'll have a much better sense of what approaches work in these groups, and I can use that in whatever work I'm doing to advance effective policy.

My own experience teaching adolescents helps in looking at these strategies.  I've been in a classroom and I keep in touch with my students, so I have a few helpful people I can bounce ideas off of.  I also think that coming from the policy perspective -- a pretty wide-angle approach to public health -- helps when considering how community and sociopolitical risk and protective factors affect our kids.  Public health strategies -- especially in areas like sexual health and other important adolescent health issues -- need to examine every level of behavioral experience, from the individual on up.  So it's important to have people in your group that can contribute from each of a number of perspectives.

-- Katherine Rogers