Implementation and greenhouse trial of a dialogic health literacy curriculum for pre-service teachers: A narrative inquiry

Health literacy is an important competency that influences health behavior and health outcomes. Because health behaviors are established during childhood and children spend most of their times at school, teachers play a critical role in improving health literacy among students. Currently, there is limited evidence regarding the impact of curriculum-based interventions on health literacy within teacher education programs.
This study was a narrative inquiry into pre-service teachers experiencing a dialogic health literacy curriculum to test the feasibility of this curriculum as a means to improve health literacy among future teachers. Data sources include a critical incident questionnaire, reflective journals, student work samples, student correspondence and observational field notes made by the researchers. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis.
Overall, the findings indicated that the dialogic health literacy curriculum was well-accepted and has been proven to be feasible. By experiencing this curriculum future teachers reported improvement in different dimensions of health literacy including pre-service teachers’ abilities to access, understand, use, evaluate and communicate health information.
A dialogic health literacy curriculum can improve students’ health literacy. This is the first study to demonstrate the positive impact of a curriculum-based health literacy program in an Iranian pre-service teacher population.