Whose health? A critical ethnography on health in Physical Education in high school of a public school Uruguaiana – RS

Abstract

Understanding the meanings of health allows us to access knowledge that demarcates not only the understanding of the phenomenon, but also decision-making in the face of this understanding. The challenge to reflect on this theme is also located in the symbolic importance that health assumes in capitalist societies, which recognize it as something easy to obtain with discipline and individual effort. The effects of this "regulation" condition the educational practices of school PE, structuring understandings about the body and health in the school context, which are important to be problematized. We investigate how the health theme is meaning in the culture shared by Physical Education (PE) teachers and high school students from a State Education Network school in Uruguaiana/RS. For the theoretical-methodological approach, we use the lenses of critical ethnography to understand the particular reality of the cultural context of school PE from the didactic-methodological relations between students and teachers, adopting ethical care. The field work involved observation, records in the field diary, semi-structured interviews, dialogues and document analysis, lasting 15 months. The analysis was developed throughout the research, respecting the triangulation of information and preserving the assumptions of interpretive validity. The meanings of health shared in PE culture at the Rio Uruguai school are anchored in a biomedical model of health, aligned with an individualizing logic that does not dialogue with the formation of critical youth.