Design of a Conceptual Model for the Study of Education, Health, and Communication: Professional Preparation Issues

The purpose of our paper is to focus on the role of communication in health education, including the ways the three concepts of education, health, and communication are related. A traditional approach would be to study the integration of health and education leading to health education. However, a more progressive approach is to study communication in the context of health education in order to investigate the interdisciplinary nature of these triadic concepts. After naming three professional standards documents in preK-16 health education which highlight communication as both a concept and a skill, we will offer our schematic for how education, health, and communication interact to form the potential transdisciplinary concept of health literacy. We believe that health literacy can be explored as an integrative study of language patterns and information formats that is broader than the printed and spoken word. We conclude our paper with a review of current definitions for health literacy, and then share a description and outline of our graduate course called Health Communication and Education