Learning Together: Sharing Circles in Rural Alaska on Cancer Education Priorities for Youth

Culturally relevant health promotion with youth is an opportunity to reduce health inequities in cancer. This manuscript describes sharing circles conducted with three communities in the Northwest Arctic region of Alaska. The circles were designed to begin understanding community priorities and lay the foundation to develop culturally relevant cancer education. The project was guided by the principles of Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR), honored Indigenous ways of knowing, and was grounded in Empowerment Theory. The project team facilitated 13 sharing circles in November 2019 in three communities in the Northwest Arctic. There were a total of 122 participants, including teachers/school staff (31%), community members (30%), high school students (23%), and health professionals (16%). The circles explored youth knowledge, perceptions, questions, concerns, and hopes for cancer information; community members’ desires for youth knowledge about cancer; and how teachers would like content to be formatted for effective inclusion in their classrooms. Common themes from the sharing circles included a desire for information on cancer prevention (all 13 sharing circles) and a need for information on cancer risk factors (12). In most sharing circles, participants shared that cancer information for youth should include stories like those of local people, cancer survivors, and role models (11), visuals (8), and local data and statistics (8). In addition, teachers and school staff in all communities wanted an online resource for teaching about cancer in their classrooms that had short videos/visuals with related lesson plans and activities. “If I learn, I can reduce the chance of getting cancer in the future.”