HealthLit4Kids: Empowering health literacy through the arts in HealthLit4Kids: the benefits of arts-based pedagogies for health literacy in primary school-aged children

HealthLit4Kids is a schools-based health literacy project aimed at improving health literacy in primary school-aged children, teachers and communities. This presentation examines the pedagogical strategies used in HealthLit4Kids in its first two years of delivery in Tasmania (Australia), with a particular focus on the role of arts-based pedagogies in supporting a social ecological model to health literacy development. Across five Tasmanian schools in varying socio-economic areas, arts-based pedagogies emerged in HealthLit4Kids as a consistently accessible and powerful means of engaging children in health literacy in a sustained way within their classrooms, and more broadly, within their communities. The presentation engages with the effort of ‘repackaging…established ideas concerning the relationship between education and empowerment’ (Nutbeam 2000) by considering how arts-based pedagogies can support the aims of health literacy within the ACHPE, but also more equitable approaches to health literacy across the curriculum and in the broader community.