Three approaches to school health education as a means to higher levels of health literacy

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that school health education is an important means for supporting the development of pupils’ health literacy. A growing number of papers have described or suggested a variety of classroom-based and wholeschool practices for developing health literacy. However, few of these papers have systematically addressed the various ways of approaching health education in schools or sought to analyze how these approaches differ from each other. This paper aims to do this. It does so by representing three approaches to school health education: the facts and skills approach, the individual thinking approach, and the personal growth and citizenship approach. The approaches differ in complexity. They can be used in planning for learning experiences aimed at supporting the development of higher levels of health literacy. Furthermore, they can be used in teacher training when the aim is to help teacher trainees to become aware of their current ways of seeing school health education, and the differences that may exist between their understanding and more complex forms of understanding