Health Education

Health education encompasses a variety of planned learning opportunities and experiences aimed at fostering knowledge, empowerment and skills in individuals, groups or communities, so that they may make decisions about and take actions to improve their health. Deemed an important component of health promotion, health education may focus on conveying information regarding risky personal behaviour and other risk factors which can be changed or avoided through lifestyle modifications in diet, exercise and other behaviours that have an impact on health and through access to the health-care system. Health education may also impart information on social, economic and environmental conditions that have a negative impact on health so that action can be taken to render them more conducive to good health. Health education can occur through educational institutions, health-care providers, interactions with others, exposure to the media and social marketing and action research.

Action research combines theory, education and action to address organizational, community and social issues with the involvement of those who experience these issues so as to improve understanding and practice. It provides a rich, collaborative learning environment where health education takes place through transformative learning. Through its participatory approach, its emphasis on dialogue, its reflective process in learning and its focus on action, action research fulfils the empowering and enabling goals of health promotion and reflects the current transformative learning trend in health education. Transformative learning takes place when individuals develop the critical [Page 396]consciousness to deconstruct prevailing ideologies; recognize the social, political, economic and personal constraints on freedom and realize that they have the power and agency to challenge and act to change social conditions and structures of power. This transformative learning is health education aimed at enabling individuals, groups and communities to increase control and take action over their health and its determinants.

The origins of health education as a component of health promotion are presented, followed by its link to action research through a health promotion approach that embraces the social determinants of health and through transformative learning that takes place in such settings, leading to individual change and ultimately to social change for better health. Future research directions are also discussed.