Abstract

VIEIRA, Rebeca Maria de Medeiros; PINTO, Tiago Rocha  and  MELO, Lucas Pereira de. Narratives and Memories of Professors of Medicine on Community-Based Education in the Brazilian Northeast. Rev. Bras. Educ. Med. [online]. 2018, vol.42, n.1, pp.142-151. ISSN 1981-5271.  https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-52712018v42n1RB20170051.

Community-based education is an educational approach aimed at integrating students into real practice scenarios from the initial years of the courses, mainly in urban and/or rural communities and in primary health care services, where the planning, implementation and evaluation of actions are developed from local health needs and ideally involve the participation of the community, health team members and the university itself at all stages. This study critically questionned the implementation process of a community-based education curriculum at a medical school created as part of the More Doctors Program in the sertão (dry hinterland) of the Brazilian Northeast. To this end, theoretical dialogues were developed between narratives, memories and the curriculum. The objective was to understand how medical professors experience community-based teaching, given the memories of their medical training. The study was qualitative in nature and developed within the framework of oral history. We used participant observation, socioeconomic questionnaires and individual semi-structured interviews to produce the narratives and contextualize the subjects. The data were analyzed by means of the thematic coding technique. The results are presented and discussed through two thematic categories: “they will be doctors within a community”: curriculum, memory and medical training and “the moment I arrived, I wanted to leave”: teaching practices in community-based education. The narratives uncovered the disparities and incongruences between a medical training modeled on prescriptions of the “traditional” curriculum and the expectations of teaching practices in the “innovative” curriculum, characterized by the centrality of the student and the local health needs that produce diverse pedagogical arrangements particular to community-based education. In this panorama, challenges, difficulties and gratifications are interwoven in a still amorphous movement and in a space where several gaps still await to be filled, described, narrated with future life histories that might elucidate how one learns to be a teacher on that horizon that expands out in front of us. Finally, it is important to highlight the polysemy of the term “community” in the context studied and the difficulties experienced at the beginning of a teaching career, which demonstrates the need for investments in teaching development in medical courses in general, and in newly created ones in particular.

Keywords : Medical Education; Narrative and Memory; Curriculum; More Doctors Program; Community-Based Education.

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