Growing Gardens in the Trenches: A Hope-resilient Approach for School Health Promotion

This chapter offers a philosophy and praxis for cultivating school health promotion, simultaneously acknowledging the grave seriousness of our individual and collective dis-ease, as well as the enduring possibility for school leaders to enact measurable change through intentional organizational culture. Proposing a rationale for the “wicked problem” of school health promotion (McCall & Laitsch, 2017), this chapter explores the influence of normalized logics of relational harm emerging from and perpetuated by the cultural paradigms of capitalism, colonialism, industrialism and technologism. Alongside an introduction of these “cultural pathogens” and how they operate to erode well-intended health promotion initiatives, insights and questions offer entry points for school leaders to co-create hope-resilient strategies with their teachers, staff and students. Health promotion is presented as requiring therapeutic action at the threshold of existing suffering, likened to growing gardens in the tender trenches of existing individual and community malaise.