Medicalization in Education and the initial formation of the pedagogue
Medicalization in Education. Historical-Cultural Psychology. Initial formation. Pedagogy.
The process of medicalization consists in the transformation of complex, multifactorial social, political and cultural issues into psychiatric disorders or other diseases under a biological determinism. Such understanding also affects education, from the medicalization of children and adolescents who do not fit into uniform and homogeneous standards of normality applied to learning. Studies indicate that teachers who are not aware of the phenomenon of medical medical education, refer their students to diagnose pathologies and do not try to elaborate pedagogical practices that seek to encompass the heterogeneity of students' ways of learning, which would represent an important way to cope with this phenomenon. For this to be possible, it is necessary to include the topic of medicalization in the initial and ongoing formation of teachers, so that it is studied conceptually and discussed in the course of the practices developed through the stages and professional performance. In this perspective, in view of the formation of in-course pedagogues developed by a public university in Natal / RN, and using the theoretical framework of Historical-Cultural Psychology, which has historical-dialectical materialism as its method, this research was elaborated with the objective of investigating the process of teaching and learning of the scientific concept medicalization of Education in the initial formation of the pedagogue. It is, therefore, a formative experiment based on Davydov's proposal, which took place between August and December 2016, with a class of 21 students from the sixth period of the in-person Pedagogy course at that university. The experiment was developed in 16 weekly classes, distributed in three stages, preceded by the survey about the knowledge held about medicalization. Seven papers written by the students were developed, object of later analysis, and the recording of the activities was done through field diary. The initial survey revealed that the students were not aware of what was medicalization and neither of the relation of Education to this phenomenon, had little information about diseases related to not learning and about the use of medicines, as well as naturalized the diagnosis. The pedagogical experiment made it possible to understand that confronting the phenomenon should involve the teacher, to begin with a critical understanding of the phenomenon, as well as the need to elaborate humanized pedagogical practices focused on the diversity and singularity of individuals, rather than to diagnose and label . The use of playful resources in pedagogical practice was pointed out as a possibility to achieve these purposes.