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Collective health and social psychology of
praxis: an interdisciplinary path for metaformation in graduate studies
Saúde coletiva e psicologia social da práxis: um caminho
interdisciplinar como metaformação na pós-graduação
Ianni Regia Scarcelli1, Mariana Fagundes de Almeida Rivera1, Ana Carolina Martins de Souza
Felippe Valentim1, Nayara Portilho Lima1, Aline Almeida Martins1
DOI: 10.1590/0103-1104202213513I
ABSTRACT This article is based on the understanding of interdisciplinarity as a way to act against the
fragmented visions present in the processes of knowledge production and socialization. The objective
is to share reflections that problematize interdisciplinarity from the experience of graduate academic
training in a research group whose members have diverse training and professional fields and focus on
the relationships between public policy, health and human needs. The reflections were based on issues
that emerged during the group’s systematic meetings, and the group was understood as a theoretical
and methodological strategy, and was sustained by the dialogue between collective health as a field of
knowledge and practice, and the social psychology of praxis, formulated by Enrique Pichon-Rivière.
The articulating axis of this experience is training in its broadest sense, manifested on the principle of
the inseparability of (i.e., learning-research-doing) and as self-training in a mutual process of reflective
teaching-research-outreach action, of learning how to learn. In this sense, it is argued that it is a metatraining that can only take place from the perspective of knowledge dialogues and interdisciplinarity.
KEYWORDS Collective health. Social psychology. Group processes. Education, graduate. Health human
resource training.
RESUMO Este artigo parte da compreensão de interdisciplinaridade como modo de operar face às visões
fragmentadas presentes nos processos de produção e de socialização do conhecimento. Objetiva compartilhar
reflexões que problematizam a interdisciplinaridade a partir da experiência de formação acadêmica na
pós-graduação de um grupo de pesquisa cujos integrantes expressam diversidade de formação e inserção
profissional e se debruçam sobre relações entre políticas públicas, saúde e necessidades das pessoas. As reflexões
foram elaboradas com base em questões emergentes nos encontros sistemáticos do grupo, que foi tomado
como estratégia teórico-metodológica, e sustentadas a partir do diálogo entre saúde coletiva, como campo
de saber e de prática, e psicologia social da práxis, formulada por Enrique Pichon-Rivière. O eixo articulador dessa experiência é a formação em sentido amplo que se manifesta pelo princípio de indissociabilidade
ensino-pesquisa-extensão, i.e., aprender-investigar-fazer, e como autoformação em um processo mútuo e de
ação reflexiva, de aprender a aprender. Nesse sentido, argumenta-se que é metaformação e só pode se dar
na perspectiva de diálogos de saberes e interdisciplinares.
1 Universidade
de São
Paulo (USP), Instituto de
Psicologia (IP), Laboratório
de Estudos em Psicanálise
e Psicologia Social (Lapso)
– São Paulo (SP), São
Paulo.
iannirs@usp.br
PALAVRAS-CHAVE Saúde coletiva. Psicologia social. Processos grupais. Educação de Pós-Graduação.
Formação profissional em saúde.
This article is published in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution
license, which allows use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, without
restrictions, as long as the original work is correctly cited.
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Scarcelli IR, Rivera MFA, Valentim ACMSF, Lima NP, Martins AA
Introduction
In this work, we share the reflections of a study
and research group that, by problematizing
training in an interdisciplinary perspective,
establish a dialogue between the field of collective health and the social psychology of praxis.
Collective health involves a great debate.
We approach the understanding that qualifies it as a field of knowledge and practices by
articulating different kinds of knowledge and
proposing significant changes for health from
a critical understanding. Regarding knowledge, collective health is based on a broad
and complex approach that involves different
disciplines in its emergence. As for practices,
collective health guides actions, not only in
the health sector, but also in organization and
work processes, reorientation of care, engagement with ways of life and relations between
people in the social context, among others. In
this way, it becomes possible to expand the
field of action beyond the biomedical paradigm
and pathologizing tendencies that privilege
the view of illness and neglect health as a
process resulting from material conditions
and a set of factors that reveal social inequality,
mechanisms of oppression, ways of life, and
subjectification.
Since collective health is situated between
science and politics in the Brazilian and Latin
American context, and requires a close dialogue between different disciplines and ways
of knowledge, it represents a unique production that allows the development of important concepts and principles in the face of the
fragmentation of human knowledge, with its
antinomies related to politics, action on the
territory, and subject’s ways of living.
However, we know that the task isn’t easy
and that there are many challenges in proposing new conceptual frameworks and possible
directions for practice. This includes addressing
educational processes that emerge from critical
and ongoing reflection on the health situation
as it relates to and is embedded in the historical,
social, political, and economic context.
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In terms of education, it is interesting to
note that the term ‘collective health’ was introduced in Brazil in the late 1970s during the
first national meeting of graduate programs,
which brought together the programs of social
medicine, prevention, community health, and
public health. As Nunes1,2 shows, the evolution
and history of graduate studies in the field is
relevant and can be enriched by the contributions of graduate programs that are open to
the problems and references from the field of
public health and enter into a dialogue across
disciplinary boundaries.
Social psychology, in turn, like collective
health, constitutes itself as a hybrid subject
located at the intersection of several fields.
Its specific problem is defined and described
as a field of boundaries, limits, filters, and
passages3. The social psychology of praxis
highlights the complexity of the confluence
of fields, disciplines, and practices that are
interconnected in the way they act, think,
and see the world, and that support praxis to
sustain dialogues that are open and allow for
movement, as open circuits.
This social psychology formulated by
Enrique Pichon-Rivière was woven on Latin
American soil from the dilemmatic experiences of the author who, as heir to the French
and Guarani cultures, was forced from childhood to integrate the heterogeneous and bring
together the different. When he became an
adult, he processed the multiple experiences
of contrasts and contradictions and translated
them into a method of scientific analysis of
reality that foregrounds the interconnectedness of phenomena and takes into account
the complex and contradictory character and
the search for this contradiction in all things,
including human thought. He developed a
method of working and learning that’s characterized by heterogeneity and contributes to
the interpretation of reality4.
Pichon-Rivière (1907-1977), who graduated in psychiatry and was one of the most
important pioneers of psychoanalysis in Latin
America, defined himself as a public health
Collective health and social psychology of praxis: an interdisciplinary path for meta-formation in graduate studies
man, a public health physician, and a social
psychologist, developing his work from the
understanding that health is built communally,
collectively constructed5. His many years of
experience in psychiatric institutions and his
various assignments allowed him to develop
a criterion for health and important issues in
the field. He strongly pointed out that there’s
an apparatus of domination in our society that
ultimately serves to maintain the relations
of production, that is, exploitation. This apparatus includes health workers as bearers of
a hierarchical, authoritarian, and dilemmatic
conception of behavior, so that professionals become leaders of resistance to change
when they make people who need medical
care believe that they are ‘wrong’, which can
put them in a situation of chronicity6.
In the course of this construction, two
closely related theoretical aspects stand out,
even if they start from different levels of generalization: the ‘conception of the subject’, which
considers the historical-social, symbolic and
cultural orders as specifically human and a
‘criterion of health’, also called active adaptation to reality or learning, a means of analyzing the forms of relation of the subject to the
world, the constitutive relation of subjectivity.
Learning processes are the subject of a systematic study, understood as a psychological
process and social phenomenon, based on
a methodology that takes into account the
occurrence of obstacles in the relationship
between the knowing subject and the object
of knowledge.
Considering these perspectives, in this
article we would like to share the reflections
and questions related to an experience in academic education that problematizes interdisciplinarity as a way to act in the face of the
fragmented visions present in the processes
of knowledge production and socialization.
These questions, developed in dialogue with
undergraduate and graduate students in a research group in two graduate programs, come
from the field of collective health and related
areas, particularly social psychology.
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This group includes undergraduate and
graduate students, researchers, and professors
from various fields, as well as public service
professionals in areas such as health policy,
education, culture, and justice. In this way, the
potential theoretical-practical extensions for
both fields in the encounter between collective
health and social psychology will be reflected.
The mentioned experience has been developed
in two graduate courses involving students from
different fields of knowledge: ‘Social Psychology’
to obtain master and doctoral degrees in psychology in the research line ‘Politics, Collective
Health and Social Psychology’ and the professional master program in ‘Interdisciplinary
Education in Health’.
Although these aren’t graduate programs in
collective health, part of the topics developed
are based in this field and represent research7
that investigate psychosocial processes occurring in areas of importance to contemporary
social life, such as cross-sectoral public policy,
and aims to understand the impact of public
policies on people’s lives, as well as the types of
gaps that arise between the political-legal and
technical-supportive spheres when it comes
to implementing new programs and policies6.
In this experience, which seeks systematic meetings, the group is privileged as a
theoretical-methodological strategy in a
perspective that doesn’t separate teachingresearch-outreach and takes into account in
its composition different topics and multiple
areas of knowledge, aiming to practice dialogue in search of overcoming dichotomies,
as well as the dialectic between subject and
society and social health needs.
Collective health and
interdisciplinarity as an
articulating movement
Collective health is understood as a scientific
field8–12 in which knowledge and insights about
the object of ‘health’ are produced and different
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Scarcelli IR, Rivera MFA, Valentim ACMSF, Lima NP, Martins AA
disciplines are active, viewing it from different
angles. It is also understood as a field of practices
in which actions are carried out in different organizations and institutions by different actors
within and outside the health sector13.
Public health has changed and become
more complex in recent decades. According to
Luz14, it has evolved from a multidisciplinary
salubristic model to a semi-open discursive
structure that continually incorporates disciplines from different scientific fields in addition to the various practices and forms of
social intervention. It can be considered as
an interdisciplinary field of knowledge whose
basic disciplines are epidemiology, health
planning and management, and social sciences
in health13. Complementary disciplines that
may be considered include statistics, demography, geography, clinical, genetics, and basic
biomedical sciences13.
In the realm of practices, collective health
encompasses the disciplines that address
Social health needs, as various work tools,
knowledge, disciplines, tangible and intangible
technologies, and as intervention activities
focused on social groups and the environment,
regardless of the nature of the profession and
the institutionalization model13(310).
It therefore encompasses a range of technical, scientific, cultural, ideological, political,
and economic practices developed in academia
as well as in health institutions, civil society
organizations, and research institutes13. From
this perspective, collective health underpins
a set of transdisciplinary, multiprofessional,
inter-institutional, and intersectoral practices
that considers as a conceptual framework “the
overcoming of the prevailing biologism, the
naturalization of social life, its subjection to
the clinic, and its dependence on the hegemonic medical model”13(310).
As we know, the form of knowledge production by disciplines has a Cartesian origin in
its sequence of analysis, in which a subject is
learned by branching, which led to a Western
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science based on specialties; a reductionism
that constructs and treats simple objects15.
With the scientific expansion in the 20th
century, the production of knowledge was
no longer aimed at branching out (analysis),
but at the construction of objects through a
process of composition of constituent elements
(synthesis)14. In this way, complex objects
emerged that were no longer subject to a
purely explanatory approach, but had to be
understood15. According to Almeida Filho15(38),
“the complex object is synthetic, non-linear,
multiple, plural, and emergent”, so that
the conventional organization of science in
autonomous and even stagnant disciplines
must be overcome by new modalities of scientific praxis, creating alternative forms of
disciplinarity15(38).
This process has led to an opening of scientific boundaries and makes it necessary
to return to the polysemy that results from
the intersection of different disciplinary discourses and that is called interdisciplinarity15. Interdisciplinarity implies a common
axiomatic for a group of related disciplines
and, being based on a common problem, can
lead to mutual learning that wouldn’t be possible through a simple addition15.
Collective health was permeated by this historical process and observed the emergence of
complex objects in its domain, which required
their transformation. As stated by Granda
(1994), cited by Paim and Almeida Filho13, in
order to study the process of health and disease,
it was necessary to consider healthy and sick
subjects, not only to explain them, but to understand them and build potential for action.
What defines a hurricane? It’s not the measurement of atmospheric pressure, not the wind
speed, not the temperature variation, not any
of these things (which can be estimated with a
high degree of precision), but all of these, united
in an integral whole that’s recognized as a hurricane, but not reduced to its dimensions13(313).
Collective health and social psychology of praxis: an interdisciplinary path for meta-formation in graduate studies
Like the hurricane, the subject of public
health is complex and cannot be reduced
to its parts13.
Luz14 explores the irreversibility of this complexity and the irreducibility of collective health
to a monodisciplinary paradigm drawn from
biology, human and social sciences, technologies
from applied sciences in health or planning and
management. Thus, in collective health, different
discursive models of disciplinary knowledge,
intervention practices, and scientific expressions
coexist, forming a hierarchical field of knowledge,
practices, and actors14.
Although the measures developed in the
field of public health aren’t defined as disciplines, we can assume that they are referential,
worldviews that can be considered as referential and operational conceptual schemes,
as proposed by Pichon-Rivière16.
Social psychology of praxis
and interdisciplinarity as
action-reflection
The social psychology of praxis expresses
Pichon-Rivière’s thought in a scheme that
systematizes a series of general and theoretical
concepts whose purpose is to explain a reality
in order to guide action on it. These concepts,
developed from the dialectical method, refer
to a domain of the real and to a certain universe of discourse that allows the instrumental
approach to a certain concrete object, and
have been called Conceptual, Referential and
Operative Scheme (CROS)16. It assumes that
every inquiry involves an operation, because
there is no inquiry that does not change the
situation in which it arose.
When approaching a field of knowledge,
the creation of a schema in this perspective
is important to adopt a self-critical attitude,
i.e., to correct or ratify, to carry out a semantic
and systemic analysis, and to include motivational aspects that relate to the verticality
of the subject and that determine the way of
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approaching reality5. In the case of Pichon’s
CROS, three major disciplines are consulted:
the social sciences, which reflect the macrostructure, the subject located in the social
structure and culture to which it belongs; psychoanalysis, which takes into account unconscious identifications in the constitution of the
subjective reference schema and the subjective
vicissitudes in the processes of change; and
social psychology, which offers important
ideas about the group, the role concept.
Pichon’s social psychology is inscribed
in a critical perspective of everyday life, has
practice as its starting point, and approaches
the subject in its social relations, in its concrete conditions of existence, examining the
dialectical and foundational relationship
between socio-history and subjectivity. It is
therefore a very complex subject, expressing
the multiplicity of processes and relations that
condition and influence each other.
As a privileged field of operation in which
the social structure and the unconscious fantasies of the subject live in interrelation, the
group is an instrument of investigation and
action. It structures itself from the interplay
of mechanisms of role assumption and assignment in a task that constitutes its purpose. It
allows the study of the interplay between the
psychosocial – the intrapsychic, the group of
interaction scenes internalized by the subject
– and the sociodynamic – the intersubjective, the external group – through the observation of the forms of interaction. This
investigation always takes place in three
directions: the psychosocial direction analyzes the subject through his bonds and
interpersonal relationships; the sociodynamic direction analyzes the various tensions that exist among group members; and
the institutional direction examines large
groups, their structure, origins, composition, history, economics, politics, ideology16.
The contributions contained in this conceptual scheme offered by Pichon-Rivière allow
a horizontal understanding of the community
as a whole and a vertical understanding of the
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subject embedded in this society, which is in
constant change, as well as the problems of
adaptation of the subject to its environment.
As an instrument, then, it enables the planning of a relationship management with nature
and its contents, in which the subject changes
himself and the world in a constant dialectical
interplay2(171).
It is a perspective that indicates an integrative vision of ‘man in the situation’, the subject
of a single science or interscience, and situated
in a particular historical and social setting.
For Pichon, this vision is achieved through
a convergent epistemology in which “all the
human sciences function as an operative unity
that enriches both the object of knowledge
and the techniques used to access it”16(170).
Thus, we consider the possibility of interdisciplinarity as a reflexive action from
the perspective of this integrative vision that
mediates open circuits that produce diverse,
simultaneous, and transformative learning.
Psychology of praxis and
collective health: building
bridges
From the conceptual scheme proposed by
Pichon, based on a multidimensional perspective of the emerging social problems in the
process of health work and taking into account
their subjective aspects, it can be deduced
that although the different dimensions of the
same problem are considered, the attempt to
distinguish between them is common, as if
something that comes from the social sphere,
crosses the subject and then returns to the
social sphere17 as independent elements.
However, from the Pichonian perspective, it
is not possible to define such boundaries in this
way. At the same time, the undifferentiation
that doesn’t take into account the boundaries fuels fears that hinder the development
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of knowledge and paralyze the processes of
work and learning.
An example of this situation is PichonRivière’s own experience training professionals at the Hospício de Las Mercedes in the
1930s and 1940s in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He recognized that one of the major problems was that it wasn’t possible to develop
the knowledge acquired in practice or operational knowledge, and that professionals didn’t
have enough information about the course of
disease and how to deal with hospital patients.
Thus, he considered the epistemological and
epistemophilic barriers that are important
causes of the paralysis of work processes in
the health sector.
Epistemological obstacles refer to the readiness or lack of cognitive and conceptual structures necessary for a particular task, while
epistemophilic obstacles refer to resistance
to change resulting from fundamental fears
of attack and loss6. The group’s attempt to
protect itself from such problems manifests as
a process of paralysis or stagnation of learning,
where the group begins to deal with learning
content in stereotypical ways16.
This prevents the opening for the inclusion
of new elements, since only the contents of the
old knowledge are admitted. Thus, one can
reflect on the complex nature of interdisciplinary work when considering such propositions.
Faced with a new situation that requires the
abandonment of old concepts, the absence of
knowledge that provides a kind of security
becomes evident, and there’s a lack of definition of the boundaries of the different practices.
It is easy to imagine such a situation in
today’s health care field, where so many social,
political, and economic changes are taking
place. In the context of work, for example,
the fears expressed by workers can also be
understood as the fear of losing their professional identity, which turns out to be a source
of anxieties that also relate to the lack of a
concept of limit6. These fears, contradictions,
and ambiguities associated with group relations in everyday work in the health sector
Collective health and social psychology of praxis: an interdisciplinary path for meta-formation in graduate studies
represent the dichotomies of thought, the gaps
between institutions, ideas, and practices.
Pichon-Rivière’s experience in the field of
mental health allowed him to conclude that the
fear of madness, related to hypochondriacal
fears of contagion and infection, was the main
source of resistance to learning psychiatry.
This is because the author recognized that
learning basically means “identifying with
the object of knowledge, literally penetrating
it”16(108). This promotes fears associated with
the idea of being trapped in the object.
Moreover, the fear of failure in the face of
new situations is also observed, namely the
fear of not knowing, “which manifests itself
as a fear of coexistence, a fear of exposure,
a fear of not responding to what’s imagined
and expected by a professional”6(168). For him,
explaining unconscious fantasies associated
with fears of loss and attack allows us to overcome this epistemophilic obstacle and thus
overcome the stagnation of learning. This
enables a dialectical leap that promotes the
continuity of the task16.
It is also important to consider that while
defense mechanisms expressed in the group
in the face of a new task are an obstacle to
building new practices, they are also forms of
“active adaptation to reality” and can configure
themselves as ways for workers to resist the
adversities they face6.
To the extent that the subject grasps and transforms the object of knowledge, he changes and
thus enters into a dialectical interplay with the
world6(174).
The fear of madness, previously expressed
by workers, as said, may now have moved to
the expanded boundaries of new areas of activity6 defended as interdisciplinarity or intersectoriality in the field of collective health.
Contributions from public health and the
social psychology of praxis bring us reflections
and questions about the dimensions of the
different orders and domains of knowledge
involved in the problems we face6. In this
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context, we are interested in the psychological
reflection that must be done from an analytical
stance that confronts the naive conscience and
questions the interplay of needs and satisfactions6 and the modalities of social response in
each concrete social formation.
In this sense, Scarcelli6 proposes four areas
that help to question, identify problems, and
delimit dimensions when carrying out an
analysis of reality that aims to criticize naive
conscience and everyday life. As a methodological framework, they are presented as
follows:
• Politico-legal: Inquires about laws, policies,
governmental and non-governmental programs resulting from these policies, as well
as their legal aspects, norms, regulations, etc.
• Sociocultural: Inquires about groups and
subjects, their needs and demands related
to proposing and implementing policies and
practices.
• Theoretical-conceptual: inquires about
theoretical and philosophical foundations,
concepts that support practices, programs,
policies, laws, etc.
• Technical support: inquires about how
practices, programs, policies, and laws are
created, implemented, and developed6(218).
These areas, which cannot be understood
and dealt with separately, together with the
dimensions of analysis proposed by PichonRivière and the extensive production that
integrates the field of public health, make
it possible to expand knowledge of the phenomena in a pluridimensional and interdisciplinary perspective. These areas relate to a
series of questions that lead to reflections on
objects and phenomena that social psychology and collective health have in common,
in order to allow a dialectical reflection that
not only doesn’t privilege any discipline, as
we’ve just discussed, but also doesn’t privilege
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any dimension of the health field, so as not to
reduce it to mere assistance in services.
This captures the breadth of the concept of
health, the actions and practices that emerge
in this context to counteract the frequent tendencies of bureaucratization and instrumental
action described by Pichon, which ultimately
simplify the complex process of health and
disease, as well as the actions and studies in
this field6.
(Meta)formation in
graduate studies
Although the group considered here is not enrolled in a postgraduate public health program,
it has both worked in and contributed to the
field over the past fifteen years. It is a group
oriented toward the thesis of inter-scientificity
or convergent epistemology as formulated in
Pichon’s social psychology; it has as graduate
students with training in psychology, sociology, physical education, occupational therapy,
and fashion, as well as professionals in the
field of health, education, and justice. In addition, the group has developed research that
problematizes public policy in areas such as
health and education in relation to gender,
mental health, justice, violence, and student
retention7. In this way, research is preformed
within related fields and also expand across
filed borders.
Such an experience is developed from the
understanding that the individual’s own axis of
articulation is education in a broad sense that
includes self-education, in order to allow the
development of an open attitude to the transition between different theoretical-practical
models, without losing the specificity of knowledge and action in the field, thus gradually
taking responsibility for his own education,
understood as continuous and permanent.
The meaning is also broad when having as
a principle the inseparability of the teachingresearch-outreach tripod, that is, of learninginvestigating-doing. This is because there’s
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research whose object is outreach activities,
and there are outreach projects that constitute
a field of research; apart from the fact that the
dialogues between professors, professionals,
and researchers are essentially teaching and
extension activities. This experience confirms
and enhances the inseparability of this tripod,
whether in the issues of curricular structure,
in the connection between the core activities
of undergraduate, graduate, research, cultural
and extension education, and in the strengthening of projects related to public and social
policies and investments in student retention.
A similar understanding extends to the
context of health work, suggesting that the
triangle of continuous education, in-service
research or systematization of experience,
and assistance management be integrated into
continuing education for the social sectors.
Education in the broad sense, then, is the
meta-goal of this group, which, as the psychology of praxis teaches us, refers to processes
of learning, active adaptation to reality, as a
path in a continuous spiral and a “learning to
learn and learning to think”16(162) that integrate
affective, conceptual, and action structures
(feeling-thinking-acting).
This understanding is the basis for the
development of activities required in graduate studies, primarily in the form of research
guidelines and the classes offered in the curriculum structure.
The two programs considered here offer a
course to students from different departments
of the university, which has had participation
from students of different areas and practices.
This course aims to discuss issues related to
public policy and implementation of health
and mental health practices, based on questions and concepts formulated in the field of
social psychology, such as intersubjectivity,
groups, institutions. It also reflects on the
challenges of social psychological research
in the field of public health policy, not in a
naturalized way, but as a result of complex
social processes consisting of tensions, conflicts and struggles between different interests
Collective health and social psychology of praxis: an interdisciplinary path for meta-formation in graduate studies
and projects of society. The course questions
and problematizes public policy and social
structure, and considers the state in a broad
perspective that’s not limited to the bureaucracy of the executive branch that implements
public policy for a particular population.
This course brings together graduate students with training in a variety of fields from
other graduate programs of our institution
and others. The development of the applied
pedagogical practice, participatory and inspired by the operational technique16 allows
a process of continuous assessment that has
favored the construction of a network of dialogues between students and professionals
from different social sectors, especially public
health, that goes beyond the period in which
it was carried out and leads to further activities, such as events and actions, cycles of open
classes that put the unified health system up
for discussion and allow the participation of
the community outside the university.
The traditional graduate program guidelines have been reformulated to follow the
dialogic pedagogical perspective and theoretical foundations on group processes. The
course is offered mainly in the group modality
to support graduate students’ training and
self-study by discussing their research and
encouraging the sharing of investigations. This
method contributes to the consolidation of
research groups and the improvement of the
investigative attitude necessary for the production of knowledge and the construction
of practices. Such didactic and pedagogical
activities in a participatory perspective presuppose a constant dialogue with others in the
social context, which is a process of creation
in which everyone recreates themselves.
Equal dialog is fundamental to teaching
and learning, even considering that education, detached from the act of research and
the production of knowledge, risks being
limited to mere training or forms of qualification that lead less to creative attitudes in the
work process and more to adapting people to
a bureaucratized logic.
1147
Final considerations
The educational experience considered here,
built on the teacher-student relationship and
group learning-to-learn process, reflects and
problematizes education as a transversal goal
in higher education, with the notion of interdisciplinarity as the confluence of different
fields of knowledge and practices. By privileging the group as a theoretical-methodological
strategy, as an operational technique, education takes place in an open circuit that favors
learning through problematization and the
resulting changes. This is possible because the
group is the immediate scenario of experience,
of the mutual determination of the subjects,
of the interdependence between the intrasubjective and the intersubjective, between the
subject and the binding context.
Moreover, it is an experience inspired
by the way of understanding education as
paideia18 to think about education in a broad
sense, manifested in the academic institution through the principle of inseparability of
teaching-research-outreach and, beyond its
limits, as learning-researching-doing, through
the constant desire of openness and through
self-education.
Such a task reveals the complexity we face
in the encounter between the fields and worldviews involved in the construction of a praxis;
understanding that every investigation and
practice not only challenges knowledge and
practice, but also transforms them16.
The complex nature of this work, which
is interdisciplinary, also becomes clear when
we consider that unknown, new situations
require the abandonment of a know-how and
therefore present themselves as threatening,
as epistemological and epistemophilic obstacles16, as a lack of cognitive and conceptual
structures that manifest themselves as resistance to change and function in a stereotyped,
closed, and bureaucratized way of working.
Finally, the research group considered here
has been concerned with the mobilization and
participation necessary for interdisciplinary
SAÚDE DEBATE | RIO DE JANEIRO, V. 46, N. 135, P. 1139-1149, OUT-DEZ 2022
1148
Scarcelli IR, Rivera MFA, Valentim ACMSF, Lima NP, Martins AA
dialogue, in terms of the social psychology
of praxis, through integrative actions that
mediate the circulation of discourses aimed
at mutual learning between disciplines, as
reflexive action. The dialogue on collective
health has taught us that this can be one of the
ways to break the practice of adding or overlapping knowledge and work on a common
task that unites us: Health.
Collaborators
Scarcelli IR (0000-0003-1620-4596)*, Rivera
MFA (0000-0001-8074-0794)*, Valentim
ACMSF (0000-0002-6488-5923)*, Lima NP
(0000-0001-8021-0056) * and Martins AA
(0000-0003-1225-318X)* also contributed to
the elaboration of the manuscript. s
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Received on 10/28/2021
Approved on 06/14/2022
Conflict of interests: non-existent
Financial support: non-existent
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