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comprehensive care; higher education; teacher training; social representations; teaching; nurse.
This thesis concerns the object of study “social representations of nurses/teachers about
teaching for comprehensive care”. In this sense, its general objective was to: investigate the
social representations of nurses/professors regarding teaching in Higher Nursing Education,
from the perspective of comprehensive care. And, as specific objectives: (1) outline a teaching
profile regarding teaching for comprehensive care; (2) characterize teaching knowledge and
practices regarding teaching for comprehensive care; and (3) discuss challenges related to
teaching for comprehensive care, in the context of the teaching practice of nursing professors
who work in Higher Nursing Education. Methodologically, the research is qualitative in
nature (Moscovici, 2012). To obtain the data to be presented and analyzed, the following
were used: the Free Word Association Technique (TALP), as part of a questionnaire; the
semi-structured interview, using a semi-structured form; and documentary research, including
the Institutional Development Project (PDI), the Nursing Course Pedagogical Project (PPC),
the National Nursing Curricular Guidelines (DCN) of 2001, the General Regulations of the
Teacher Training Center (NFD) and subject plans made available by the Coordination of the
Undergraduate Nursing Course during the data construction period. Its theoretical-
methodological reference was the Theory of Social Representations (Moscovicci, 2012), the
Central Nucleus Theory (Abric, 1998; Sá, 1996), the Representational Spiral System (Arruda,
2002; Melo, 2024) and Analysis of Content (Bardin,2011). The entire experiment was built at
the Regional University of Cariri (URCA), Crato – CE campus. Commitment and
interdisciplinarity were the central core elements of the social representation of the
participants in this research regarding teaching for comprehensive care. This representation is
associated with the perception of the demand for teaching comprehensive care, by the
admission of the human being as holistic, by the relationship given to teaching-learning
contents from an interdisciplinary perspective, and by the value given to action and reflection
in the student training process, by valorization of a health care model centered on the human
person and not on their illness, as well as the admission of the need to teach the Nursing
Process as a peculiarity of the nurse's knowledge. Regarding teaching practices for
comprehensive care, it is inferred that the subjects' commitment related to the object of study
is in the process of practical teaching and in Health and Extension services, through which the
aim is to stimulate reflections on comprehensive care through problematization of realities in
the teaching-learning of nurses' collaborative and autonomous practices. Teaching for
comprehensive care presents challenges linked to the demands of compatible didactic-
pedagogical training, effective teaching-learning of comprehensive care under an integrated
curriculum, and more teaching dialogue to strengthen interprofessionality, interdisciplinarity
for coherence between care plans discipline and Course Pedagogical Project, which
emphasizes student training oriented towards comprehensive care, located in a critical rather
than technical rationality.