I can honestly say that as a librarian who worked within schools, Health Literacy was not even on my radar. It wasn't until I attended Ruth Carlyle's Keynote Health Literacy: information literacy for life at the LILAC conference in 2019 that I really became aware of how important it was for school librarians and our students. It gave me the opportunity to talk to students who were not going to university about the importance of media and information literacy in a way that would mean something to them. Everyone at some point in their lives will have a health issue. This is so much easier for students to understand than needing to learn these skills for referencing your latest piece of work.
Why write about this now?
Ruth Maloney and I run a Twitter Spaces Chat called #LSLLTS. We choose a topic and invite guests to come and talk with us. On the 7th February, we decided to talk about Health Literacy and the link to the school library and invited Ruth Carlyle to join us as our guest. She suggested that Catherine Jenkins would also be a good fit so much to our delight we had the makings of a great session.
Rather than tell you about the conversation we had, why not listen to it yourself? Please note - The video below is just audio.
What followed?
I had not realised that there was so many resources out there for teachers and school librarians. There are some great lesson plans, especially for PSHE and Science teachers. Resources for displays in school libraries and classrooms as well as games and other fun resources to engage students with health literacy.
All the resources that were discussed have been shared below:-
Belfast's Pharmacy Literacy Programme https://www.belfasthealthycities.com/pharmacy-schools-programme
Newsflash! game (set in a school library): https://www.newsflashgame.org/
Health Literacy for Schools https://southlks.libguides.com/HLschools/home
Health Literacy for Schools https://royalberkshire-nhs.libguides.com/health-literacy-for-schools/home
Public Health England https://campaignresources.phe.gov.uk/schools/topics/mental-wellbeing/overview?WT.mc_id=BH_Schools_EVERFI_MENTALWELLBEING_MARCH_TWITTERADS_AD3_general2#subscribeModal
WHO on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@who?lang=en
If you want to read more, these were also recommended during conversations that followed.
Children's critical health literacy
Bray, L. et al. (2021) ‘“People play it down and tell me it can’t kill people, but I know people are dying each day”. Children’s health literacy relating to a global pandemic (COVID-19): an international cross sectional study’, PLOS ONE, 16(2), p. e0246405. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246405.
Fage-Butler, A.M. (2018) ‘Challenging violence against women: a Scottish critical health literacy initiative’, Health Promotion International. doi:10.1093/heapro/day067.
Nsangi, A. et al. (2020) ‘Effects of the Informed Health Choices primary school intervention on the ability of children in Uganda to assess the reliability of claims about treatment effects, 1-year follow-up: a cluster-randomised trial’, Trials, 21(1), p. 27. doi:10.1186/s13063-019-3960-9.
If you take a look and use any of the Health Literacy resources please let me know what you think. Feedback would be very useful to the people who created them. Thanks!
Now what?
If you would like to know more about our Twitter Spaces chats or would like to join in please just follow either myself @Elizabethutch or Ruth Maloney @RuthMaloney30 on Twitter and we will post the link and topic a few days before.
Would you like to listen to all the other recordings?
Parental Engagement
Online Collection Development
Professional Development and Training
Knowledge Managment is it for us?
Can School Librarians be Leaders?
Collection Development
And More...
You can listen to all the recordings of the above chats as well as my archived training sessions via my membership.
If you have any questions please just ask...
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