Importance Of Theoretical Thinking In Health Promotion

1. (15 points) Discuss theoretical thinking in health promotion.

a. Why is it important that we theorize about health promotion? (3)

i. Theorizing about health promotion is important because it can be to reflect on the past, creating effective interventions for the present, and providing a roadmap for the future (Goodson, 2010, chapter 2). The Tuskegee Study in the Goodson textbook is a good example of reflecting and theorizing about health promotion in the past. A possible theory for Tuskegee incident was that in the past, medical practitioners were trained to treat the disease that causes pain and illness to the body vessel. Patients were treated as an object and not an individual human being. Now, because of we have reflected and theorized

I don’t think that I was trained to be a theoretical thinker before this class. In my undergraduate university we briefly covered theories so that we have some exposure to it, but that is about it. I was expose to a lot of scientific theories since I was in middle school, but what I learn from that is not to question the science and just accept the fact as is. So I think that teacher should also be comfortable with teaching students about theories and ways to apply theories into real life so that students can make a connection that there is a use for theory. To this day, I still uncomfortable with theory because I didn’t not have a full understanding of what it really is or feel like I will have a use for it. I think that it is important to start teaching about theories and how to applied them at a younger age. By doing this, the student is aware of theories and have a lot of time to work with theories until they become comfortable about theories. Theories should not be covered once and forget about it until they take another theories class. It should be taught, give the student time to absorb the knowledge, and revisited to make sure that students understand. However, I don’t know if this is possible because of the time and amount of information that teachers are required to each to meet expectation of the

One of the challenge Goodson (2010) mentions in chapter three was, “the barriers to the integrations of theory and practice” (p. 63). This challenge reflects to my answer to part c of this question, where I was taught about theory, I was not taught on how it can apply in practice. Wrenn and Wrenn (2009), wrote about integrating practice into theory learning and how it can be adapted to other curriculum. One of their recommendation is to apply a learning model where, “students are actively involved in a cyclical process that includes observing, applying, reflecting and sharing their experience” (p. 261). When I was taught about theory, I just try to absorb as much information as I can and I did not have a chance to talk about ways that theories can be use in different setting. I think this learning model can be integrated into a professional training to so that practitioner can have a refresher course about integrating theory into their practice. Another step could be integrating more theory based internship requirements into higher education. This will give students an opportunity to apply theories into their career field and a chance to reflect what they have learn during their