Editorial

Volume 10, Number 1 of Trabalho, Educação e Saúde begins with Charles Herold Junior's essay Body at work and body for work: Perspectives in the Study of Corporeality and Education in Contemporary Capitalism. This title gives a clear indication of the concerns that guided the researcher. These are the relations between the world of work and corporeality. Marxism is the theoretical basis, and the text begins with a warning: changes in work make no less present the requirements that perpetrate on the body. Herold Junior leads us to question the contrast between the body's visibility in social life and the invisibility built around the body at work and the implications this has for studies in this area. It also shows that the historical formation of the body and the history of education can be thought of in a coordinate manner, emphasizing the distinction between manual and intellectual work as references relevant to consider the relationship between education and body in contemporary societies.

The experience of teaching and producing knowledge in everyday life is the fundamental issue of the first three articles in this issue, which have Paulo Freire as their central point of reference. In the first, Continuing education with community health agents: A proposal for care of asthmatic children, by Maria Wanderleya de Lavor Coriolanus et al., the subject matter of the study is the connection between the active methods of teaching and issues that comprise the integral care of patients with asthma. The context is the training of community health workers, and the precepts of the continuing health education policy guide the experience around which the study was carried out. The goal is to produce an education that deviates from a technicist approach to the health issues and positions culture in a central dimension of training. The study combines components of qualitative and quantitative research.

Irene Leonore Goldschmidt's The Theater of Augusto Boal and Vocational Education in Health proposes to blend elements of Freire's pedagogy with the polytechnic education concept in order to investigate the possibilities of incorporating Boal's theater as a teaching experience. The author's argument is underpinned by the involvement of these theories with a human training that opposes the technicism that is dominant in both professional education and in health. The polytechnic emphasis in the integration of work, science and culture provides fertile grounds for an approach with the theater of Boal. To this playwright, to educators identified with the Marxist polytechnic references, as well as to those who use Freire's pedagogy, human development requires critical awareness and a stance against the social forms of oppression, something that the theatrical experience helps put in action.

The completenesshumanization binomial of care and production in health has been extensively studied, particularly in the hospital setting.

This is the context where we find the study addressed in Hospital Class: Coordination between Health and Education as an Expression of the NHS' Policy of Humanization, by Edson Zombini Vanderlei et al. The outline of the subject matter, formal education in situations of hospitalization, increases our understanding of the appropriateness of including this type of education in the NHS.

Humanization, as a policy and as an ideal that goes beyond relations of care, is also the axis of discussion in Maria Alice Amorim Garcia, Fernanda Proa Ferreira and Fernanda Avenoso Ferronato's Humanization Experiences for Students of Medicine. Tackling the complexity of the issues that shape the universe of practice humanization, the authors associate the possibility of going through new experiences that cause 'unrest' as a necessary part of medical training. It is based on the narrative of these experiences that the researchers weave their analysis, providing connections between the improvement of teaching strategies and a professional performance that is more committed to solidarity, over and beyond ethics based on the recognition of the other as subject and in the "interest in a more holistic way of being a physician."

The origin of a research project can bring some pointers on how the researchers think about the production of knowledge and the relationship with the social spaces that, at any given time, become the locus of the project. The Importance of Problematization in the Construction of Knowledge in Community Health, by Rosiane Torrezan Mitchell, Raul Borges Guimarães and Maria Fatima Pilgrim Furlanetti Rotta, is a study based on the demand among a community's residents for health education activities. As such, educational act and research are coordinated based on the broader healthenvironment relation. Throughout the text, the authors emphasize collective dialogue as a value given its power to create opportunities to emerge the meaning that community's subjects build on reality, a condition of any movement of transformation.

In Quality of Life of Public School Science Teachers in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, by Liliani Mathias Brum et al., the authors resume the discussions on the connection there is between health and work as a subject matter for research. In this case, it is the production of suffering and health in the teachers' work that is under the spotlight. The study situates the teaching activity as work that takes place in a mismatch between the demands that are required and the means provided to meet them, making the load brought about by the work part of the routine. The investigation aims to characterize the health issues that affect the teachers included in the study, considering this knowledge one of the many requirements necessary to interfere with the quality of life of teachers and, therefore, attribute value to the educational work.

The last article in this issue, Informal Caregivers in Portugal: Experiences in Caring for Elderly, by Maria João Fernandes Marques, Helena Jorge Cardoso Teixeira and Dayse Cristine Dantas Brito Neri de Souza, presents the perceptions of informal Portuguese caregivers with regard to taking care of dependent elderly relatives. The emotional, physical and financial overload that affects them is noticeable in their statements. The study's results show the caregivers' interest in improving their training in order to care for family members, but they also show the weaknesses in their qualifications.

Samuel Quinaud Rossi et al.'s report A New Look on the Preparation of Teaching Materials for Health Education is featured in this issue of the magazine and presents elements that contribute to thinking about teaching materials, one of the mediation elements in the teachinglearning process that sets teachers from all areas into motion and often requires creation and adaptation efforts.

Two reviews close this edition. The first is by Carlos Minayo and discusses the book titled Saúde, trabalho e direito: uma trajetória crítica e a crítica de uma trajetória (Health, work and law: a critical path and the criticismo of a path), organized by Fadel Luiz Carlos and Maria Helena de Oliveira. The book organized by Francisco de Oliveira, Ruy Braga and Cibele Rizek, Hegemonia às avessas: economia, política e cultura na era da servidão financeira,(Hegemony Inside Out: Economics, Politics and Culture in the era of Financial Servitude) was reviewed by Ivan Jairo Junkes.

Angélica Ferreira Fonseca

Carla Macedo Martins

Marcela Alejandra Pronko

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  27 Mar 2012
• Date of issue
  June 2012