Wiki-Debbie

=**Health literacy** ...= ... has been 'flavor of the month' in adult ed and even more so in public health and the medical fields for several years now. Defined by the National Institutes for Health as **"the ability to understand health information and to use that information to make good decisions about your health and medical care,"** it's a natural fit for adult education, where -- because low general literacy correlates strongly with low health literacy -- we serve many people whose less-than-optimal health literacy may be adversely affecting their health and their finances (and the economy and national morale, but that's another story). And we have access to American adults who are in a good enough place in their lives to be pursuing their goals in GED or ESL classes, unlike the medical profession, which tends to see us when we're most stressed and least able to take in in information or learn new skills. Not only that -- working in the opposite direction, health content and competencies are natural fits in our classes; everybody has health, and almost everybody likes to discuss it, so health literacy is a natural community builder and a built-in rationale for why people actually need to learn to do ratios and percentages and critical thinking -- attention to health literacy in adult education classes can improve student persistence and outcomes, too.

Our experiment ...
The agency I work for, Parkway Area Adult Education and Literacy in St. Louis County, Missouri, has had a grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health and support from Health Literacy Missouri for almost two years now. We wanted to put together a framework for health literacy that would address a lot of critical health content and competencies without creating a curriculum to impose on students and teachers. The idea is that health literacy naturally segues into GED and ESL lessons and doesn't need to be taught as a curriculum but can be integrated into what we're already doing. Ten of our teachers, six in ESL and four in GED, have piloted the framework twice, and our whole staff will pilot it starting in August. While teachers are somewhat on their own to assess their students' interests and needs for health education, we have put together a website of resources that include websites, print materials, teacher-made lesson plans, and more. But it's only useful if it's used and kept up to date.

What you can do ...
That's where this wiki comes in. I have toyed with the idea of putting the whole website on a wiki so anyone can add useful content. So far I'm not ready to do that, but I would welcome discussion of that idea on the discussion tab. For now, I would also welcome suggestions of content we don't have on our site under the discussion tab, but as soon as I figure out more about how to do a wiki, I will probably make pages you can edit yourself.

If you'd like to see our site, it's here: [] Please check it out and let me know how we can make it better!

This wiki is an experiment that I'm doing as part of Social Media small groups thanks to the NIFL PD listserv -- bear with me while I figure it out.