Increasing the Size of the Scottish Health Literacy School Figuration Through Creative Technological Approaches

Over the last decade or so, Scotland has built considerable expertise in the field of health literacy. It has published two national action plans to raise awareness and develop improvements in the field and built significant research capacity and has seen health literacy form a key part of many national policy programs. Scotland now faces the challenge of translating this fruitful progress into action, through teaching and learning in schools, particularly in the context of the primacy of digital approaches. This chapter will explore using figurational sociology, how this enactment can be realised through increased interdependence between people who were previously unconnected. By interdependence we mean that relationships between the resource providers we mention and teachers as end users. Specifically, we will consider how digital approaches can be used by teachers to deliver the Curriculum for Excellence Health and Wellbeing (Scottish Qualifications Authority, Curriculum for Excellence Health and Wellbeing. Accessed 31 Mar 2023 at https://education.gov.scot/Documents/health-and-wellbeing-eo.pdf, n.d.) as the national curriculum in Scotland, by highlighting explicit alignment. We conclude the chapter by providing five recommendations for how digital approaches to develop health literacy in schools will enable what we term reality congruent health literacy teaching and learning. We use reality congruent according to its figurational sociology meaning as ‘…the knowledge of it that is possible’ (Giovannini, Using fantasy: notes on Elias’s sociology. Human Figurations 4(3). Accessed on 24 Sept 2022 at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0004.306/%2D%2Dusing-fantasy-notes-on-eliass-sociology?rgn=main;view=fulltext, 2015, para. 1).