La palabra es salud (the word is health): Comparing popular education vs. traditional education for increasing empowerment and enhancing health knowledge among Latino, parish-based community health workers

Popular education is a philosophy and methodology for education and organizing that seeks to create settings in which people can discover and expand their knowledge and use it to create a more just society. It is gaining prominence as a strategy for building capacity in communities to advance health equity. La Palabra es Salud (The Word is Health) used a quasi-experimental design, mixed methods, and a CBPR framework to systematically compare popular education and traditional education as methods for increasing empowerment and enhancing health knowledge among Latino, parish-based Community Health Workers (CHWs). Results suggest that, when compared to traditional education, popular education can help participants develop a deeper sense of empowerment and more multi-faceted skills and understandings, with no accompanying sacrifice in the acquisition of knowledge. In this workshop, participants will become familiar with the study and explore its implications for their own work. The session will be co-facilitated by a CHW who is the former Chair of the APHA CHW SPIG and a researcher who conducted this study for her dissertation. Popular education will serve as the philosophy and methodology for the session. This means that facilitators will start with what participants know, create settings in which participants can learn from each other, use interactive techniques to build on what participants know, and explore how participants can apply what they have learned in the workshop to their own unique settings. Techniques used will include brainstorming, sociodramas, problem posing, cooperative learning, radio plays, and dinámicas.