Health education: what influences teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions from 16 countries of Europe, Africa and Middle East?

Abstract

One of the major objectives of the European FP6 BIOHEAD-CITIZEN project on “Biology Health and Environmental education for better citizenship” (STREP, CIT2-CT2004-506015, Carvalho et al. 2004) is to analyse the potential differences between countries by associating teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions to controlled parameters, such as level of training, religion, political view and the broad socio-cultural context. A questionnaire was constructed with the participation of all Biohead-Citizen project research teams. The original English version was translated into each national language and after validation of the translation it was pre-tested before implementation in each country. A total of 6379 teachers and future teachers responded to the questionnaire. They were from 16 countries (of the 19 composing the Biohead-Citizen consortium) from Europe (West to East: Portugal, France, Italy, Malta, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Cyprus), from Africa (West to East: Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia) and from the Middle East (Lebanon). Statistical multivariate methods to investigate complex data featuring the conceptions of many individuals were used. Results showed that the countries, rather than religion, have great effect on teachers and future teachers’ views conceptions on biomedical model or the health promotion approach. Furthermore primary school teachers (P), both in-service (InP) and pre-service (PreP), are more associated to the health promotion view than all the secondary school teachers: in-service Biology (InB), in-service Language (inL), pre-service Language (PreL) and pre-service Biology (PreB) teachers. Pre-teachers consider that health education should be taught at school, not only by the families, and that teachers should be obliged to teach even if they do not feel confident in doing it whereas teachers with teaching experience are more defensive in this respect, assuming exactly the opposite. In addition, the co-inertia analysis allows highlighting the correlations between differences in health education conceptions and the differences on political views.