Environmental education and Health education: an integrated

experience

Danielle Grynszpan

danielle@ioc.fiocruz.br

Oswaldo Cruz Foundation

IntroductionLatest years:

• The increasing number of diseases (including the viral ones), current or resurgent, have been manifesting in the whole world, in the industrialized countries as well as in the ones in development – examples of flu : swine flu, with an epidemic feature.

Reappearance of infectious diseases and socio-environmental issues:

• Devastation of forests and construction of barrages – they cause the rupture of the ecosystem equilibrium, and interfere in local people’s lives.

• Migration process caused by friction in different aspects (ethnical, religious, floods, for instance) or facility for a fast voluntery shift of huge contingent of people.

• Human demographic concentration , becoming worse with the lack of material and service infrastructure

This paper reports on work with public school teachers from different types of Brazilian municipalities, from the coast to the interior and from capitals to small towns.

Survey of the teachers’ acquirements, opinions and beliefs becomes vital for the understanding of the possibility that these important social actors have in terms of identifying problems, analyzing the facts and suggesting solutions for concrete actions. In the case of reemerging diseases, the educational role stands out: decrease of reinfection taxes according to the individual’s social and educational environment..

Our work involves the concern with the delimitation of strategies of stimulus for the educational work in terms of Health Promotion – as advocated by Ottawa Letter, 1986, and in 1996 by the Brazilian Ministry of Health.

The importance of working on social determinants: offer conditions that may lead to a better life quality.

Work Description

With the larger purpose of facilitating teachers' perception of the identity between environmental education and health education; the study focuses on local issues related to quality of life, as well as local teachers' concepts concerning health and environment.

Objectives:

1) Emerging and reemerging diseases: how are they explained?

2) Would they happen by chance? Be related to fatality?

3) Would they be caused by a unique agent, like a “microbe”? (reductionist view - Pasteur’s inheritance)

4) Would serious ecological issues as the devastation of forests and the construction of barrages be taken into consideration?

5) Would the social conditions be taken into account? (demographic concentration without an appropriate infrastructure, for instance)

Study Conceptions: First step: formulation of a general radiography and a quantitative one

based on a inquiry with a sample from 356 public-school teachers about their knowledge concerning diseases.

An educational process oriented by conception studies may co-operate for the understanding since it praises the connection among the facts.

Our research, developed in a large capital of the country, Rio de Janeiro, pointed out: acquirements concerning health is still fragmented in relation to the ways infirmities are spread and in relation to the possibilities of prevention.

Second step: development of a qualitative research based on a sample formed by a representative from each one of the 29 teaching coordinating states among which the State wide teachers are distributed.

What are the main notions of these instructors

about the origin of an epidemic: fatality, contagion

or transmission?

What would be the points of view, the impressions and the most important conceptions about health, about illness of these central mediators, that is, the teachers?

Categories used for the material

systematization hadn’t been

previously defined, but, in fact, they

were based on the data collected from

the perspective that the concepts are

not isolated entities, they are based on

specific cultural contexts?

Results:

Experience accumulated with public-school teachers: existence of a real mosaic of conceptions.

View of health associated with the hygienist connotation and an individualistic point of view: 48% of the teachers that answered the inquiry.

Interviewed: 25% believe that health is a state that is reached through respect to the norms and rules of hygienic practice.

Levels of knowledge concerning the ways that viruses can be spread A) The view associated with a fatal attitude considers health as a state The view associated with a fatal attitude considers health as a state

that depends on events that would be part of “a natural history of the that depends on events that would be part of “a natural history of the world”world”

Supernatural explanations: Divine interference or fatalities?The upsurge of these diseases would consist on an uncontrollable

problem which would depend on the scientific development, because it depends on some facts that are over the human competence.

B) Description about the causes based on the contagion concept

We found out that, even if the teachers knew the role played by the vectors (mosquitoes, for examples), some still believed that the infirmities were

always caught right through the environment.

Example – for 16% of the professionals of education interviewed, “the contagion” could be right through the environment, through the water

The contagion could also happen, for 27% of the interviewed ones, right through direct personal contact

C) Answers that make use of the transmission concept.Concern that infirmity (like yellow Fever and dengue) can be contracted from a

mosquito that has previously bitten one person that was infected Only 13 % of the interviewed ones – believe in the existence of a specific intermediary

vector.The belief that viruses are the consequences only related to the action of agents as

insects or microorganisms: Pasteur’s inheritance, restrictive view based on a unique cause / a direct effect – prevent the transmission conception favored by environmental factors.

“...the insects and the microorganisms are the cause of these diseases.

Research PerspectivesSurpass the concept focused on – a unique cause / a direct effect.

This reductionist view implies blaming exclusively the insects, virus and/or bacteria for the upsurge of the cases of disease.

Stimulate the process of shared construction of health concept as a dynamic process, with environmental influences which involves a never-ending search for a better life quality.

Favor a wider and connected comprehension to the social and environmental imbalance – paradigm of health promotion

Finally, the study analyzes the importance of intersectorial cooperative programs facilitating long-term educational projects. The partnership between different institutions and actors aims at the construction of joint lines for actions of environment education and social mobilization. The partnership is an important condition to the improvement of public-schools teachers’ training schools.

Association among teachers, researchers from the science didactics area and scientist:

• Development of methodologies of intervention based on the data of

the conception inquiry

• Development of educational materials associated with strategies that help a investigative behavior among students

Some prototypes of the materials have been tested by public-school teachers from the most different educational coordinating states from Rio de Janeiro District, besides friends from other countries, so that these prototypes can be improved before their final version and their systematic usage by the program “ABC in Scientific Education ( ABC na Educação Científica) – Mão na Massa” (ABC – Academia Brasileira de Ciências) which stands for Brazilian Academy of Science.

We emphasize the role of education in health promotion, enabling collective actions – citizen’s life quality improvement, working in favor of health, going further than just preventing diseases – another paradigm.

Environmental education and health education are closely related, and both are involved in the discussion of social determinants that are basic to life quality improvement.

Despite the interdisciplinary curricular connotation of the transversal themes "Environment and Health", which points at a transdisciplinary perspective, these issues remain, in daily practice, under the almost exclusive responsibility of the natural sciences field.

In the intention of awaking the interest on socio-environmental questions, demanding rights in relation to the sustainable environment and for a best quality of life, the school is instituted as a place of solidarity practices, through actions of collective interest and of the exercise of the citizenship in the tentative to contribute to transform local realities.

Merciabcnaciencia@ioc.fiocruz.br