Potential topic areas of interest include:

·    Successful and innovative models of worker health and safety training that help workers to play a meaningful role in setting health and safety policies and practices in the workplace. These should include discussions of barriers or obstacles encountered in the development and delivery of training, and also workers’ ability to apply in the workplace what they learned in the training.

·    Examples of worker empowerment as a result of the training, as well as evidence of how and why the goal of worker empowerment through training and education may be difficult to achieve.

·    Models of training to engage workers (including immigrant workers), community members, and environmentalists to build capacity for improved environmental public health (including the work environment).

·    Successes or difficulties with models where worker health and safety training and education is integrated with other important subjects in the curricula, such as labor, economic, or social policies

·    Innovative training and education programs to prepare non-English speaking populations to respond to hazardous materials incidents and natural disasters in their communities and workplaces.

·    Discussions of the legal supports for health and safety training – at the federal and state levels – particularly looking at how state and federal laws influence workplace policies and practices.

·    Innovative evaluation of health and safety training and education, and how the evaluation can be used to shape occupational and environmental health policies. These would include discussions of successes in overcoming obstacles to evaluating health and safety training programs.

·    The differences between worker training and worker education – and effective ways to integrate these efforts.

See http://www.osha.gov/dte/sharwood/new_solutions_callforpapers.html for more information.