Playing and Learning with and for Life: Researching Innovative Environmental Education in Primary Schools
This paper examines action research projects in two Queensland primary schools, where parents, teachers, children and the wider community have been working together, through their local actions, to create healthy and sustainable futures. In different ways, both schools have been striving to create play and learning spaces where children can have ‘intractable involvement with nature’ and can build supportive social relations. These have been complemented by developing explicit curriculum programs that provide integrated outdoor learning opportunities; enhancing skills in democratic decision-making; and taking actions for sustainability. 
 
In one project, the ‘health promoting schools’ concept was applied, initially at least, in order to redevelop the schools grounds into ‘learnscapes’. In so doing, the project built partnerships between parents, children and teachers. Later, a democratic health decision-making model was utilised as the basis for student-centred, action-oriented curriculum projects exploring health, social and environmental issues. Examples of these issues, identified by the children themselves, include: Dirty Creeks, Crime in the Suburb, Litter in the School Grounds, Car Park Safety, What’s In Your Lunchbox? 
 
In the second project, the focus was the development of a ‘learnscaping’ curriculum to support the school’s newly landscaped school grounds. This involved extensive interactions over a five year period, culminating in teachers collaboratively developing integrated learning activities based on the outdoor environment and which would involve the school community in learning how to become ‘stewards of the Earth’.
Implementing the IVAC model: lessons from an Australian case
This paper discusses the engagement of a primary school teacher with a democratic approach to the teaching of environmental health education as part of a Health Promoting Schools project The Investigation—Visions—ActionChange (FVAC) model developed by Jensen was used to give students an opportunity to define a local health or environmental problem of significance to them, to acquire knowledge about the problem, to envision possible solutions and then, based on these, to take some action to address the problem. The paper discusses two constraints faced by the teacher when using this model and makes suggestions for ways in which to overcome these.
The New Public Health
THE object of this book is to bring before the general public the newer conceptions of the aims and methods of public health. The older public health mainly dealt with the environment; the newer is chiefly concerned with the individual. The old teaching stated that infectious diseases were generated in the foul, ill-smelling, unventilated, sunless hovels of the slums; that a pinhole leak in some plumbing fixture accounted for diphtheria or typhoid fever; that dampness caused malaria, and impure water yellow fever. The new teaching begins and usually ends with the search for (a) the infected individual, (b) the routes of spread of infection from that individual, (c) the routes of disposal of the excreta of the community, by which, if infection occur, the infecting agent might reach the members of the community. To locate all the infective individuals of the community and to guard all their discharges is the ultimate goal of modern preventive measures.The New Public Health.By Prof. H. W. Hill. Pp. x + 206. (New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1916.) Price 5s. 6d. net.