LAUSR

The college setting offers myriad opportunities to help students prevent current and future health issues, for themselves and others. Complex societal and information environments mean that students must develop equally complex cognitive skills to successfully navigate that ecology and make optimal health decisions. Debating the idea and uses of critical thinking may prevent development and testing of content and methods to help students prevent chronic disease. I propose that we consider the possible worth of critical literacy as a theoretical framework for such content in courses like “Health Essentials,” “Personal Health and Wellness,” or “Consumer Health.” Critical literacy, at its simplest, means knowing (and being able to act on) what you need to in order to do what you want to do. Critically literate people understand the context of health-related decisions and choices. They know the basic information that Health Educators hope will help encourage healthy choices, but they also are likely to recognize information, policy, and larger societal environments’ impacts on their ability to make healthy decisions and on the healthfulness of options available in the first place. Critical literacy and sociopolitically situated health behaviors