Digital technologies for healthy lifestyles? A collaborative study to develop critical digital health pedagogies with and for young people (DigitalHealthEdu) through creative and participatory digital methods

Introduction: The DigitalHealthEdu project focused on digital technologies for health promotion through which young people learn about and understand their bodies, health, fitness and well-being. Specifically, they promote normative gendered body ideals, neoliberal notions of the self and discourses of health consumption, conforming a public pedagogy that often come into tension with formal education.

Goals and Methods: We aim to co-develop with young people innovative and critical pedagogical ideas about digital health technologies in schools, informed by a deep understanding of the meanings, contexts and social factors that shape Spanish young peoples relation with digital health.

Following a participatory, multi-method and iterative research design, we have developed a range of post-qualitative methods to co-produce data with young people (aged 14-17): 1) Digital diaries to capture the digital health experiences of 52 participants in their natural, spontaneous context; 2) Co-creation workshops (78 participants in 5 schools) through creative methods and experimentations (e.g., body mapping, ming mapping, avatar making, etc.), for the development of critical pedagogies. A transversal stage of Participatory Action Research was also developed with 17 young people to inform the research.

Results: Drawing in a feminist new materialist approach, we conceive the process of producing data with young people at schools as a rhizomatic and complex experience of collaborative knowledge production that unfolded through successive and ongoing ‘intra-actions’ between human, digital, social and material entities that produce intense affects.

Conclusions: We expect to provide a substantial knowledge about how to develop critical pedagogies with young people as collaborators, adopting a whole school approach, and with new materialism as framework, something that has not been done before. Through this path, we expect to contribute to the development of new theoretical concepts and innovative participatory creative methods in digital health research.