Health education at school: knowledge, values and practices in teacher training

Abstract

This article aims to expand the studies on Health Education (HE) at school, articulating issues related to teacher training and strategies of conceptual development in health in the curricula. The proposition was to verify which knowledge, values and practices have been gaining prominence in the scientific productions related to HE at school regarding teacher training. The study has looked into academically produced articles, theses and dissertations indexed in the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) and in the Digital Database of the University of Minho (Portugal), from 2014 to 2019. To understand the analytical corpus, Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) (Moraes; Galiazzi, 2014) was used, aiming to identify the meaning units in the texts. Thus, this study conducted a critical narrative review of the literature, which is fundamental to discuss the subject and to draft the justification for choosing the theme for the research and its constitution. Through observations gathered from the investigation, it can be inferred that knowledge, values and practices are intertwined with the empowerment of the subject about HE, which indicates that self-care, promotion of a healthy life and the prevention of diseases does not happen individually, in a fragmented or simply prescriptive way. However, the research also revealed that this articulation remains limited in terms of syllabus in schools.