Healthy Masculinities and Reframing Middle School Health

HOW MIGHT WE reframe the current middle school health program to explore healthy masculinities and better address students’ evolving needs, making it more relevant to their lives?

The Evolution of my Thinking:

I really enjoyed using Flint as a design thinking coach to help me develop my HMW question further, and also to generate solutions after I’d already gone through the process. I found it helpful to be asked questions about the current health program, important stakeholders, and student engagement to fine-tune my question. I found the solution-generation very useful to make strides to move my action project forward. I appreciated the deepening of how I might actually make this action plan happen. Below I’ve included my iterating – in blue pen are my initial ideas, and in green marker/on post-it notes are additional ideas suggested by Flint and C21 peers. Both resources have helped me to think beyond what’s in my mind.

With Flint’s support generating solutions, I came also out of the experience with:

• Reflection questions for middle school students to be used in a survey
• Reflection questions for high school students to be used in informal conversations
• Reflection questions for parents to be used during parent-teacher interviews

Through the Fantastic 4s Ideating Activity, pictured below, I thought beyond what’s already been circling in my mind in relation to time/space, technology/tools, people, and partnerships. I’ve got additional people I want to bring into the conversation for this project, locations where these conversations might take place, and tools I might be able to use to simplify the process. There’s so much I can incorporate into classes once I get the research part complete, but for now I’m sticking to the researching phase to make the project manageable!

What’s happened since the 2nd F2F and what’s next in my project?

As always, I was ambitious with my tasks to complete and planned experiments. Here’s an update on where I’m at and what’s next for this action plan:

• Survey Grade 7 & 8 Students — complete; responses synthesized using chatGPT to look for trends
• Informal Conversations with 9s & 10s — incomplete; will continue to look for opportunities to have these conversations (possibility to visit advisor groups)
• Information Conversations with school adults — incomplete; will continue to look for opportunities to have these conversations; might need to schedule them to make them a priority; set up a table to record responses/perspectives
• Survey Parents — TBC at March PT interviews; sample questions generated through Flint
• Sharing Survey Results — TBC in February
• Build Partnerships — I’d like to reach out to WiseGuyz who are doing this work in Alberta, as well as look into other IBSC schools who are excelling in this work. Not sure when this will happen, but putting it in my blog helps to make it a ‘real’ action item.

Ongoing Support & Questions:

The ongoing questions I continue to circle back to relate to the constant evolving definitions of “healthy masculinities,” the actual need to pursue this project within the school, and how to lean on places that are already doing this work well in order to avoid reinventing the wheel. I appreciate the C21 community for helping to deepen my thinking throughout the process and look forward to any questions and suggestions that come my way after this blog post!