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Introduction: This cross-cultural study compared both the symptoms of anxiety and their severity in a community sample of children from Colombia and Australia. Method: The sample comprised 516 children (253 Australian children and 263 Colombian children), aged 8 to 12-years-old. The Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) was used to measure both the symptoms and levels of anxiety. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to compare the samples. Results: The results showed a significant difference in the severity of the symptoms between the children in the two countries. In general, Colombian children reported more severe symptoms than their Australian peers, however there were no difference in the types of symptoms reported by the children in the two countries. Discussion and Conclusion: The implications of these findings and their importance to cross-cultural research are discussed. (Contains 6 tables and 1 figure.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how the authors shifted from teaching about sustainability as though it was fixed and definable, to a way of learning about the multiple ways in which sustainability is contested and understood. This shift involved both an epistemological shift in their understanding of sustainability and a shift in teaching practice. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reflects on the authors' teaching practice and describes a shift from an investigative to an interpretative approach. This shift resulted from taking students out in the field to hear from land managers and community members in regional and rural Victoria about how they understand sustainability. Central to the shift was recognising the value of the learning occurring "out there". Findings: The authors argue that had the students remained in the classroom learning about sustainability with community and its socio-environmental context at a distance the shift that occurred in the teaching and learning experience would have been less likely to occur. The authors now see themselves as facilitating a process where learners (both teachers and students) are exposed to different understandings of sustainability and are able to recognise the messy and complex reality of sustainability on-the-ground. Practical implications: Much of what is going on in sustainability education is prescriptive: environmental targets, audits, energy and water efficiency, sustainable design mapped on to the curriculum of various disciplines and fields. This paper highlights the need to broaden out the sustainability education agenda, to fully examine how it is taught, why and what is its value to learning. Originality/value: This paper describes the development of a course that explores the complexity of on the ground sustainability in regional and rural Australia. Such an approach to teaching about sustainability is innovative in that it challenges taken for granted assumptions about what is and is not sustainable by exposing students to conversations with ordinary people making sense of and attempting to negotiate change in their lives. In this learning experience sustainability becomes a complex set of discourses and practices that interweave through and over people's lives rather than a check list of appropriate practices. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)

Eight papers on Australia's school health programs discuss: creating health promoting schools in the United States; intersectoral collaboration for developing a national framework for health promoting schools; school-based health promotion nationwide; auditing health promoting schools policy documentation; the nature of health service/school links; research; the impact of Australia's national health promoting schools initiative; and secondary HIV/AIDS education. (SM)