Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

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The Education Through Work for Health Program (PET-Saúde) aims to qualify the workforce for the Brazilian Unified Health System. This study was carried out to evaluate the contribution made by three PET-Saúde experiments in medical training. Based on historical and dialectical materialism, we sought to understand the integration of PET-Saúde in medical education as a social phenomenon subordinate to the historical conditions of economic production. Data were collected from reports made by students, tutors, mentors and coordinators of three groups of PET-Saúde at two universities in Curitiba, southern Brazil, through interviews and focus groups. It was concluded that, in two groups, the experiences contributed to training flexible workers, effective in the application of technology to solve issues within the limits imposed by the current order. In the third group, the experience contributed to training critical subjects, able to question the limits imposed by the State and society to the full realization of life.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a popular health education program directed to community seniors with regard to their attitudes toward aging. The program was based on the Paulo Freire methodology and on World Health Organization's active aging policy. It consisted of 16 weekly 150minute sessions offered to two groups of elderly (n=16) aged 60 to 75 years (M=66.88±5.4). Pre-testing, post-testing and follow-up were carried out to measure matters related sociodemographic, health, and lifestyle issues, as well as attitudes toward aging. Content analysis showed a statistically significant decrease in the frequency of negative attitudes, increased positive ones, and an improved perception that aging involves both gains as losses. The results suggest that such interventions can drive the quality of life of seniors by engendering a more positive view of old age itself. The program that was undertaken has also contributed to the daily lives of professionals working in the area of education and health.

The purpose of this article is to raise a few arguments and make theoretical contributions to support the pertinence of the link between the so-called critical environmental education and the environmental justice movement due to the approach in how they define the causes of the current crisis, establish social struggle strategies, and defend the anti-capitalistic corporate project. This link is not only timely for the process of overcoming the destructive, alienated social relations of nature, but also underpins a perspective of the political ecology for which the determinations are material and of class. In the three movements - critical environmental education, environmental justice and political ecology - there is an ongoing argumentative process of ideological resignification of the environmental issue, acting as a counterpoint for the hegemonic interpretations of the common sense on the socioenvironmental phenomenon. They all have elements in common that form the amalgamation through which one can critique and, yet, operate politically on behalf of social transformation.

This is an exploratory descriptive study based on a qualitative approach which purpose was to understand how health service coordinators involved in providing care to individuals in psychological distress perceive the organization of the mental health care network in Santa Maria, state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and vignettes in the months of April and May 2008. Ten health service coordinators participated in the study. The data were processed through thematic analyses and, subsequently, grouped into three clusters of meaning: The understanding of care flows, network operation, and of the difficulties and potential envisioned. The results showed a network under construction, highlighting the existence of movements aimed at improving coordination between the services and the resulting quality of care provided to the users of the mental health care network. The authors propose a reinforcement of the relations between the services, heightening the relationship between primary care, substitutive services, and hospital care. Emphasis is put on the role played by management in the process, considering the need for the involvement of different sectors in order to attain a more qualified mental health care service.

This article aims to analyze the students' expectations with regard to the vocational training courses provided under the "Projovem Trabalhador" occupational health arch, in Rio de Janeiro, the educational concepts and strategies used in the courses, and the changes that took place in their social situation in the educational, economic, psychosocial and socio-political dimensions. This is a qualitative study that used focus groups and interviews with 58 students of the courses. In the educational dimension, vocational skills received were insufficient and did not prepare students to face the challenges of the labor market. Most continue pursuing courses in order to increase their chances of employment. In the economic dimension, most of the young people remained unemployed, while in psychosocial dimension there was reference to the issues of subjectivity, self-esteem, and improved communications and sociability. Insofar as the socio-political dimension is concerned, the students' biggest gain was in understanding their rights as citizens, but this did not lead them to act in the spaces of society, such as trade unions and social movements. It is concluded that the students' perceptions and the meanings that they attribute to the Program reflect the contradictions of the policy, indicating that young people are not mere passive recipients, rather subjects of rights and protagonists that demand an education that meets their interests.

This paper aimed to present teaching experiences that used the care training brief as a research-training methodology in preparing course completion papers in the College of Nursing. This teaching approach is intended to cause the students to reflect on their own training process in order to become aware of events, strategies and spaces that, to them, throughout their lives, contributed to their training. In this regard, the process of building the brief favors readings regarding care to be brought up again, enabling students to narrate their training experiences, in a significant manner, in the course of their education. Reflecting on the learning made while preparing the training brief allows the process of narrating and listening to oneself and to Others to be a factor is seeking new professional identities and new knowledge. Thus, the brief is a pedagogical tool for critical reflection that reinvents the person's care with him or herself and the care for Others, a fact that is extremely important both for the future health professional and for the educator.

This article investigates the health and environment issue as presented in an educational collection on science for Elementary Education based on the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. The gender and pre-gender concepts were used to research the actional meaning of the text through which three main groups of generic structures were identified: descriptive, explanatory, and narrative. By analyzing these structures, one can find action modes that discipline social identities, social relations, and knowledge and belief systems.