This article is an earlier version of a entry from THENCEforth the THENCE.us Blog about professional development in schools inquiring “Where do we go from here?”
Head lice? What’s SEL got to do with it?
The acronym SEL stands for Social and Emotional Learning, while DEI stand for Diversity Equity and Inclusion. In this health oriented e-learning course, awareness and improvement of SEL skills, as well as cultural humility and competency around all hair textures are two big learning objectives that should accompany the third learning objective which is knowledge of procedures and technical skills for removing lice from a child’s hair and scalp.
Although head lice outbreaks are not a medical emergency, strong feelings of disgust, embarrassment, and stress typically follow. Often accusations and finger pointing fly between adults due to the major stigma of having a child with a case of head lice. “I have heard and observed horrible exchanges over head lice outbreaks.” Says Dr. Katherine Schlatter Co-founder at THENCE LLC. “While head lice cases are easily treated, it is the time needed, the anxiety, and fear of costly treatments that causes the most stress among parents.”
Dr. Schlatter initiated this health education module not only to provide practical, safe and affordable technical advice, but also to counter misinformation, and poor culturally competency around diverse hair textures.
“Because I am a parent of three, I have experienced and observed that the moment cases start popping up in school is also the moment we begin to forget our social and emotional skill sets. This is too bad, because children really need to see us handling a minor problem such as a head lice case with practical reactions, not outsized disgust.” She adds.
For this reasons Dr. Schlatter saw the opportunity to offer micro lessons in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) alongside the practical and technical advice to counter head lice cases, or reoccurrence in previously treated hair. She saw that school educators, health educations and nurses can take advantage of heightened emotions to talk about key concepts like stigma, isolation, and community cohesions when facing the challenges of head lice cases among students. How does the e-learning module achieve this? “We offer an inquiry-based method that asks key questions through interactive exercises. We are leading learners to become familiar with how stigma unfolds and gets perpetuated, or how misinformation gets repeated.” beings able to identify this is part of building the key knowledge around social and emotional learning among students. “However, the adults must take the lead by not displaying stigmatizing behaviours like gestures of disgust when discussing head lice.” Says Dr. Schlatter.
Co-Founder and THENCE Partner Andrea Patterson, an Obie award-winnning actor and teaching artist, brought her own testimony to the module. She shares a real experience in which her daughter’s braid work was unnecessarily tampered with by a school nurse who knew little about textured hair types, and the fact that coily hair is far less vulnerable, if not immune, to head lice infestations. The nurse’s lack of of cultural competency in this area led to the hair style being destroyed, and the child feeling exposed to ridicule as her hair remained conspicuously undone for the remainder of the school day. Ms. Patterson relates how stigmas around head lice, or for example, naturally coily hair textures, are housed in misinformation, discrimination, shame and fear. A mixture like that can have damaging effects on children as well as their parents. Internalized shame, for example, often leads to absenteeism, skipped classes, or missed work, due to embarrassment, insomnia, or a lack of school belonging, she explained.
Can administrator, educators, parents and guardians be more conscious in how they handle head lice cases and school outbreaks? “Yes, and we are here to help!” Says Dr. Schlatter who is also a parent of three school-age children. “We have done a lot of research into stigma and head lice outbreaks. Quite sadly the literature suggests that the strong emotions during these non-emergency health challenges are rarely addressed, but they really need attention.”
This is why this week and next in the run-up to Halloween THENCE is offering our Community Head Lice Solutions training course for free. It is intended for the community school ecosystem and it’s also a module that demonstrates how THENCE micro lessons for professional development work for even the busiest of educators and health providers. The module reviews the most effective, proven and safest ways to treat head lice infestation and sustain lice-free heads of hair. In addition it tackles the never-talked about issues of stigma, the finger-pointing, and how to counter the out-sized emotional reactions to school head lice cases.
There are other major problematic barriers to head lice treatment. These include time-commitment, costs, and the emotional toll that whole-household treatments can take on a family. These are barriers to completing treatment, and these barriers often lead to reoccurring cases for weeks or months, which only exasperates school nursing staff, teachers, family members, and administrators.
The THENCE Community Head Lice Solutions e-learning module is the first holistic approach to school community head lice outbreaks with a health equity lens that digs deeper into why outbreaks are so pervasive, difficult to end, but also the cause of collateral damage among community members who are teased, or worse face isolation from the school community. This training is offered alongside an evidence-based set of tools for communicating the harmful affects of stigmatizing language and school-friendly strategies that better support families with reoccurring head lice infestations.
Register below with the name of your school to get a free month of micro lessons that meet your state’s Professional development requirements.
