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by a UK-based researcher( Lloyd Williams A, 2022), in which children work in groups to exchange opinions about their community, select a topic and develop a short acting scene, and perform it in front of their peers and adults. An evaluation found that not only children but also teachers benefited from these sessions( Goto A, 2020a). Teachers learned how to enhance children’ s creativity and capacity to express opinions about their community and became more aware of the importance of children’ s voices in community development. Following the successful implementation of the ACT workshop, we added“ BODY” and“ FOOD” workshops to the program. In BODY, children learn about their own health through exchanging opinions with peers, presenting storyboards about historical figures in medicine, and measuring and graphing their pulse. In FOOD, children learn about the connection between health and food, discovering local foods, cooking and tasting them, and drawing their daily meals. In the ACT component of the three-workshop program, students have the opportunity to express their thoughts about the relationship between food, health, and more widely about their local community.
In 2017, Japan’ s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology( MEXT) released new guidelines for courses of study to be implemented in schools from 2020 to 2022. Using the slogan“ Zest for life,” the goal was to foster children’ s ability to think, make judgments, and express themselves( MEXT, n. d.-a). In other words, this promoted the idea that schooling should be less about what teachers teach students and more about what students can do and how they learn( Yamanaka S, 2020). The guidelines also included the development of skills for children to live and interact with others in the community. Our Creative Health project matches these national trends in education policy.
When implementing Creative Health in Fukushima, we valued the right of individual schools to have ownership of their teaching; thus, some schools decided to implement all three workshops, while others chose to conduct only two( in most cases, BODY and FOOD). In this report, we compare the learning outcomes for children in two school groups, participating in two and three workshops, respectively, to gain practical recommendations for future project management.
2 Method
The main activities of Creative Health are shown in Table 1. The project was implemented and evaluated as described above, and the details have been reported previously( Goto A, 2022b). Of note, the original FOOD workshop included a practical cooking activity, but this was substituted with a demonstration of cooking and sampling of cooked food owing to COVID-19-related restrictions( Goto A, 2020a, 2022b).
The workshops for analysis were held in elementary schools in Fukushima Prefecture between 2021 and 2022. Group I comprised 92 children in 5th grade( 10-11 y. o.) at one school who participated in three workshops( BODY, FOOD, and ACT), and Group II comprised 125 children in 6th grade( 11-12 y. o.) at two schools who participated in two workshops( BODYand FOOD). Of note, the Group I school was located in a municipality with Deliberate Evacuation Areas while the
Group II schools were located in a municipality without such areas.
Before and after the workshops, participants were asked to respond to the following questions:“ Are you satisfied with your health?”“ How do you feel about the place you live?”“ How do you feel about the food in your place?” and“ Are you willing to help prepare meals at home?”. Answer options used a face-scale adapted for children and ranging from 1 with a neutral expression to 5 with the happiest expression. Stata version 18( Stata Corp LLC, Texas, USA) was used to perform a two-way mixed-design ANOVA. The between-subject effect was group, and the within-subject factor was time( before and after the workshops). We confirmed the interaction between the two variables.
After the workshops, text-mining analysis of qualitative data in Japanese was conducted to compare the two groups’ learning outcomes, using KH Coder, version 3( Higuchi K, n. d.). A co-occurrence network was performed to categorize frequently used words.
This study was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of Fukushima Medical University( Fukushima Medical University Ethics Committee Approval No. General 2020-060). This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants in Aid for Scientific Research( No. 19KK0060). Parental written consent and children’ s informed assent were obtained for this study.
3 Result
For Group I( Table 2), the scores for two evaluation indicators increased following attendance at all three workshops: satisfaction with your own health( 3.36 to 3.85) and feelings about your community( 3.72 to 3.95). Likewise, in Group II, the scores of two evaluation indicators increased: satisfaction with your own health( 3.52 to 3.83) and feelings about the food where you live( 3.92 to 4.05). The interaction( group x time) was statistically significant( p = 0.033) for the feelings about your community. A simple effect test showed a significant difference between pre- and post-workshop scores for Group I( p = 0.019). There were no significant interactions for health, food in their community, and helping with meals( p > 0.05). Significant increases from pre- to post-workshops were found for health( p < 0.001) and food in their community( p = 0.007).
The results of the text mining of the children’ s free written opinions after participation are visualized in Figure 1. Words used among both groups were“ anemia” and“ vitamin C and iron.” The words that appeared only in Group I were“ taking care of my health,”“ communication,”“ move,” and“ movement.” Those that appeared only in Group II were“ blood, heart, and lungs.”
4 Discussion
Children in Group II only became more positive about their own health and the food in their community, while children in Group I who experienced all three workshops became more positive about their community overall, as well as their own health and the food in their community. This is a marked observation, especially given the relatively younger age of