Transforming Sanitation and Hygiene Behaviour of Basic-Level Students Through Participatory Classroom Pedagogy in a Public School in Nepal

Introduction

Despite increased attention to the importance of students' active participation in classroom learning, it is still not widely practiced or incorporated into curricula or teaching strategies in Nepal. Teaching and learning in public schools in Nepal tend to be more didactic and teacher-oriented using the dogmatic lecture method (Acharya et al., 2020). Students are encouraged to recite the words, formulas, meanings, and definitions in the name of learning. Health education teachers at schools promote the lecture method to ideas achieve learning objectives in class. There is very little or no use of local resources as instructional materials for teaching and learning purposes. Motivating students, advancing teaching and learning with full participation, and respecting life experiences and self-feelings are deficient (Habrat, 2018).

This chapter aims to fill this gap by sharing an example from the Rupantaran project, designed and implemented to improve students' sanitation and hygiene knowledge, attitudes and behaviors using participatory pedagogy as a teaching and learning method. Participatory teaching and learning is one of the essential aspects for promoting the practical knowledge of students (Dhungana et al., 2022), which enhances the qualities of education with the aspiration of collaborative learning. Freire (1970, p. 50) envisioned, “Participatory classroom pedagogy is a theory of an educational approach that potentially represents the ideal of a democratic society. It generates a change of power, a revision of the hierarchy within schools and of the theoretical vision of the child. The participatory pedagogical approaches create collaborative knowledge and actions and foster empowerment”. As elaborated on in this chapter, the concept of participation in the project poses various new challenges in teaching and learning in the school education system in Nepal. It is increasingly becoming a required issue of health education teaching and learning. Different phrases such as 'starting with the students', 'linked to the students', 'user involvement', 'co-influence', 'co-responsibility', 'co-creation', etc., are used as the synonym for participation (Bruun Jensen & Simovska, 2005; Simovska, 2007). Participation could be viewed as both a means and an end of a health-promoting intervention and the main constituent of the teaching and learning strategies within democratic health education (Kumar, 2020). The participation of students stresses their construction of knowledge, open divergent outcomes and targeting individual and social change (van Oorschot et al., 2022). It illustrates how teachers can actively apply participatory approaches to improve the quality of teaching and learning outcomes.

Furthermore, the student's participation in teaching and learning denotes the number of decisions which usually attract students toward the direction of their health behavior change (Yan et al., 2015). The qualities of the participatory homeroom teaching method plan to advance sharing of force and self-association, and the conceivable outcomes of incorporating vulnerabilities make correspondence upgrade social issues. It also facilitates extended peer communities for reaching socially comprehensive, robust scientific knowledge (Howard, 2001). Throughout this chapter, we will reflect on several discrete features of participatory pedagogy as a tool for awareness raising, knowledge transformation, and health behavior change and a process of promoting meaningful and equitable enterprises in school-based participatory action research within the frame of the NORHED/Rupantaran Project in Nepal.