4º Conferencia Interamericana de promoción de la Salud y Educación para la salud

Apresentação de Trabalho
Health Education Based in Paulo Freire´s Pedagogic Thinking: Leading and Autonomy

Despite their progress, developing countries have great challenges to overcome. In this journey, educational institutions performed an important role to guarantee the integrity and equality of their communities. Throughout university extension programs the Brazilian universities have been trying to realistically contribute to the citizenship formation, since these programs most of the time aim to take care of the people socially excluded from the building of citizenship process. Popular education for health is historically tied to this trajectory of struggling for the disruption from the dominant tradition of making and understanding health, based on biomedical and marketing visions. The relationship between popular education and health has been gradually strengthened and has made room for the building of a dialogic relationship between public and private sectors, aiming to build conjointly and critically this pedagogic practice which demands for the involvement of the civil society. Organized and collectively, the civil society searches, by means of education, to promote the growing of the criticism and the creation of ways to respond to the challenges found in the health area. In the last 9 years the São Judas Tadeu University, in São Paulo city, has been developing the bases of popular education in health by means of its Extension Program “Projeto Sênior para a Vida Ativa” (Senior Project for Active Life). It is a popular project by nature, based in Freire´s pedagogic thinking, which aims to build knowledge in biopsychosocial health of elderly individuals. Teachers and instructors are also benefited from the project because they have the opportunity to perceive themselves as leads of the social reality. In this context, the aim of this paper is to describe how the extension universities courses aimed to the communities is a valid strategy to qualify individuals in relation to self-care and to keep their autonomy, searching for develop both individually and collectively the planning and promotion of health strategies. The practice of the project has as theoretical and guiding axes the Successful Aging Theory, the Pedagogy of Autonomy and the Health Promotion Guidelines, and its educative actions are supported by the dialogicality, humanization, exchange of knowledge and participatory empowerment. Among the activities experienced in the Project stand out: a) the physical activity practice framed and linked to the elderly´s reality; b) the academic background of the physical education professional in which the students follow the classes of the project and the meetings of the study group weekly. Doing that they can think over the practical classes besides building the knowledge needed to carry out actions next to the elderly population and to establish a bond so that the look into the Other became more humanized. The learning acquired by the participants of the Project is structured through the collective building of knowledge, multiplication and strengthening of the political-organizational processes. As a result, the praxis allows that all the individuals enrolled perceive themselves as leads in the process of building knowledge in health, making them mobilizing agents for actions which notwithstanding require improvement and, above all, commitment.

Key words: Health Education, Elderly, Physical Education, Freirean Pedagogy