PRESENTATION
Health-related training: investigating practices within undergraduate courses
At a time of facing challenges, and with the prospect of transformations in health-related higher education, thereby significantly (re) constructing the training processes for students, teachers and the community, the set of articles that make up the Dossier section of this issue of Interface provide a rich depiction of the experiences, knowledge and suppositions that form scenarios of teaching and learning, each with its own pace, specific features and meanings.
The first article, Curricular change: construction of a new pedagogical training project in the field of Speech Therapy, presents a careful descriptive-analytical survey focusing on the educational transformations within a training experience. The authors have identified the following points as advances within the process of changes in the course they have analyzed, among others: greater integration between the basic disciplines and the professional training activities; greater linkage among the teaching, research and extension activities; and greater interaction among students at different training levels, as to health promotion and disease prevention. Through analyzing the challenges, they emphasize the disordering and reordering intrinsic to this process.
With the possibility of putting students into learning spaces that are potentially different from the more traditional scenarios, the second article, Academic Leagues and medical education: contributions and challenges, investigates the role of academic leagues within the informal curriculum and within future physicians' learning process. The authors highlight the possibilities for undergraduates to build up significant formative routes that stimulate the construction of practical knowledge, thereby linking the intellectual, affective and relational dimensions of learning and developing their critical and reflective capacity. Moreover, the authors consider such possibilities to be important for developing these academic activities within medical courses.
The third study, Reflective training: teachers' representations of the use of reflective portfolios in physicians' and nurses' training, also contributes towards the current debate on health education, through bringing into the discussion an investigation on the use of portfolios during undergraduate training for nurses and physicians.
The authors emphasize that the teachers they interviewed recognized that the strategy in constructing this instrument was to make it possible to stimulate students' reflective capacity and to continuously follow up the processes relating to their personal and professional development. This implies boosting their reflective knowledge, with the ethical-academic purpose of emancipating the students undergoing the training.
Along with the common thematic thread of transforming health-related education, it can be seen that the three studies presented here also share the trait of showing that qualitative research was the appropriate methodological route for answering the questions that run through the day-to-day process of training health professionals. They portray health, education and qualitative research as a complex and important trio.
Also along these lines, the text Discussion lists as a teaching and learning strategy for postgraduate health studies, published in the Open Space section of this issue, sets up a theoretical and methodological analysis that is closely related to and convergent with the discussion on health-related training and its investigation.
Education, this immense word! This expression from Cecília Meireles establishes the meaning of investigating the processes of health-related training: opening interlocutions, presenting ideas, feeding the debate and inspiring studies. It is our wish that the ideas, projects and prospects presented in this issue will also start up dialogue, learning and designing of new investigations on the relationships among education, health, training and research.
Nildo Alves Batista e Sylvia Helena Batista
Universidade Federal de São Paulo
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
31 Aug 2012 -
Date of issue
Dec 2008
