Dance as health education for community health workers

Background: Alaska's geographic vastness and isolation creates substantial challenges in health care access. Consequently, community members are selected by their tribes to provide village-based health care in Alaska's remote communities. Community Health Workers (CHWs) receive training and continuing education in Alaska's urban centers.

Methods: CHWs participated in dance as an interactive learning modality within cancer and wellness courses. After warming up and introducing basic movement vocabulary, CHWs reviewed key course concepts by creating representative movements. In pairs, course participants shared their movements, stringing the motions together to lead a CHW-created health dance and learning reminder.

Results: Seven 5-day wellness courses since 2008 and seven 5-day cancer courses since 2009, have included dance as health education for 145 CHWs. Course participants included 127 women and 18 men of whom 110 self-identified as Alaska Native and/or American Indian. A written end-of-course evaluation was completed by 98% of participants (142/145). As a result of course participation, 121/142 CHWs reported positive intent to change their own behavior and 124/142 wrote ways they planned to impact community health. Qualitative data supports ways dance impacted course likeability and knowledge retention.

Conclusions: Dance has been identified as a traditional way of knowing in Alaska Native communities, while movement allows for kinesthetic understanding and integration of knowledge with intellectual and emotional domains. Qualitative data demonstrates CHWs support of dance in health education and their resulting intent to change behavior as a result of the educational experience.