| Learning Objective #1: Understand how partnerships can be used to benefit a nursing school teaching project to help the students, the area children, and the community in tobacco-smoking prevention | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Understand how originality in a teaching plan can benefit the teaching/learning interaction between the student teacher and the child learner and be beneficial in motivation, attention, interest, and ownership |
The purpose of this project was to expose schoolage children to the knowledge of consequences of tobacco smoking and to prevent development of a life long habit of smoking. The second purpose of this project was to give baccalaureate pediatric nursing students the opportunity to plan, present, and evaluate a tobacco prevention teaching project while interacting with schoolage children. And the third purpose was to involve the students in a meaningful community service project to make an impact on health promotion. A review of the literature shows that up to 36% of US adolescents smoke and 22% smoke in the state where our nursing program is located. Smoking is the #1 health concern of the pediatric population and the #1 preventable disease of the adult population. An effective teaching project needs to be peer lead (student), involve a multi-media approach and reach children before adolescence. A teaching project was designed to have students partner with and present a teaching project to children in area girl scout troops, after school programs, and private schools. A key design element was the student's originality, rather than a scripted presentation, to encourage student ownership and motivation. The other key was a tee shirt "give-away" to personalize the project for the students, to motivate the children and to become a message "billboard" for other children. Funding for the tee shirts and for teaching aids was awarded through another partnership with the county health department (tobacco restitution grant money). The project was a success. In only one semester forty three students received health teaching experience, over 180 schoolage children received direct quality education on tobacco abstinance, and an unknown number of children received indirect exposure to the anti-tobacco message via the tee shirt billboards.
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