Culture and care: challenges of teaching Anthropology in Public Health undergraduate studies

Abstract

After 10 years of activity in the field of graduation in Public Health, changes in the profile of university students in public universities and the public inclusion policies and recent approval of curricular guidelines, it is necessary to reflect on how teaching Social and Human Sciences in Health has been accomplished in undergraduate courses, addressing the dilemmas and possibilities of existence. This essay analyzes the challenge of teaching Anthropology in the Public Health Bachelor course of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), raising questions about the curricular guidelines putting into debate daily life and practice of forming sanitarians. The analyses depart from daily experience in classrooms with first semester students, who demand from the beginning to compose the hybrid set of knowledge and practices in order to situate themselves between the reflexive and the practical poles as well as between praxis and theory. This allows for developing strategies that move towards a posture implied in the production of social thought in health and its practices. The analyses also cover the inseparable activities of teaching, research and extension that take place in daily classes, and their different learning fields, wherein the construction of knowledge is based on the intersubjectivity of relations, thus indicating that no one becomes devoid of knowledge and experience.