Looking at Learning
and Teaching
1CHAPTER
1-1
A health worker’s most important job is to teach—to encourage sharing of
knowledge, skills, experiences, and ideas. The health worker’s activities as an
‘educator’ can have a more tar-reaching effect than all his or her preventive and
curative activities combined.
But depending on how it is approached, and by whom, health education can have
either a beneficial or harmful effect on people’s well-being. It can help increase
people’s ability and confidence to solve their own problems. Or, in some ways, it can
do just the opposite.
Consider, for example, a village health worker who calls together a group of
mothers and gives them a ‘health talk’ like this:
What effect does this kind of teaching have on people?
You can discuss this question with your fellow instructors or with the health
workers you are training. Or health workers can discuss it with people in their villages.
You (or the learning group) may come up with answers something like
these:
“It’s the same old message everybody’s heard
a hundred times! But what good does it do?”
“It goes in one ear and out the other!”
“The mothers just sit and listen.
They don’t take part.”