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Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk

Environmental health literacy (EHL) has recently been defined as the continuum of environmental health knowledge and awareness, skills and self-efficacy, and community action. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of university scientists, partnering with local organizations, developed and facili...

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Autores principales: Davis, Leona F., Ramirez-Andreotta, Mónica D., McLain, Jean E. T., Kilungo, Aminata, Abrell, Leif, Buxner, Sanlyn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6210322/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30304865
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15102203
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author Davis, Leona F.
Ramirez-Andreotta, Mónica D.
McLain, Jean E. T.
Kilungo, Aminata
Abrell, Leif
Buxner, Sanlyn
author_facet Davis, Leona F.
Ramirez-Andreotta, Mónica D.
McLain, Jean E. T.
Kilungo, Aminata
Abrell, Leif
Buxner, Sanlyn
author_sort Davis, Leona F.
collection PubMed
description Environmental health literacy (EHL) has recently been defined as the continuum of environmental health knowledge and awareness, skills and self-efficacy, and community action. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of university scientists, partnering with local organizations, developed and facilitated EHL trainings with special focus on rainwater harvesting and water contamination, in four communities with known environmental health stressors in Arizona, USA. These participatory trainings incorporated participants’ prior environmental health risk knowledge and personal experiences to co-create training content. Mixed methods evaluation was conducted via pre-post participant surveys in all four trainings (n = 53). Participants who did not demonstrate baseline environmental science knowledge pre-training demonstrated significant knowledge increase post-training, and participants who demonstrated low self-efficacy (SE) pre-training demonstrated a significant increase in SE post-training. Participants overall demonstrated a significant increase in specific environmental health skills described post-training. The interdisciplinary facilitator-scientist team also reported multiple benefits, including learning local knowledge that informed further research, and building trust relationships with community members for future collaboration. We propose contextual EHL education as a valuable strategy for increasing EHL in environmental health risk communities, and for building academia-community partnerships for environmental health research and action.
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spelling pubmed-62103222018-11-02 Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk Davis, Leona F. Ramirez-Andreotta, Mónica D. McLain, Jean E. T. Kilungo, Aminata Abrell, Leif Buxner, Sanlyn Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Environmental health literacy (EHL) has recently been defined as the continuum of environmental health knowledge and awareness, skills and self-efficacy, and community action. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of university scientists, partnering with local organizations, developed and facilitated EHL trainings with special focus on rainwater harvesting and water contamination, in four communities with known environmental health stressors in Arizona, USA. These participatory trainings incorporated participants’ prior environmental health risk knowledge and personal experiences to co-create training content. Mixed methods evaluation was conducted via pre-post participant surveys in all four trainings (n = 53). Participants who did not demonstrate baseline environmental science knowledge pre-training demonstrated significant knowledge increase post-training, and participants who demonstrated low self-efficacy (SE) pre-training demonstrated a significant increase in SE post-training. Participants overall demonstrated a significant increase in specific environmental health skills described post-training. The interdisciplinary facilitator-scientist team also reported multiple benefits, including learning local knowledge that informed further research, and building trust relationships with community members for future collaboration. We propose contextual EHL education as a valuable strategy for increasing EHL in environmental health risk communities, and for building academia-community partnerships for environmental health research and action. MDPI 2018-10-09 2018-10 /pmc/articles/PMC6210322/ /pubmed/30304865 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15102203 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Davis, Leona F.
Ramirez-Andreotta, Mónica D.
McLain, Jean E. T.
Kilungo, Aminata
Abrell, Leif
Buxner, Sanlyn
Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title_full Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title_fullStr Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title_full_unstemmed Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title_short Increasing Environmental Health Literacy through Contextual Learning in Communities at Risk
title_sort increasing environmental health literacy through contextual learning in communities at risk
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6210322/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30304865
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15102203
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