POPULAR EDUCATION: A WAY TO ORIENT THE EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN PRIMARY CARE

This work, according to the theoretical-conceptual and methodological perspective of popular education, maintains that such role strengthens a pedagogical action that democratizes the relationship between the health services and the population. For it is important to consider the popular ways of dealing with health, which could be part of this wider vision, analyzing how popular classes see health, disease and cure. It is an extremely complex view permeated by conceptions of the world, life and death, social justice, a sound environment, happiness, well-being and transcendence. It should be considered that, when people do not follow medical prescriptions, or when they look for an alternative in home-made treatments, this may be happening for a number of reasons, jointly or not: economical, cultural, family and so on. In an approach based on a wide health conception, the center of the process lies in dialog, in discussion, in order to get acquainted with people’s lives and their problems, before providing any kind of orientation. It is exactly in this world of practices and small movements, little or not at all visible, that popular education tries to act, in the sense of unveiling both the processes of oppression and the potentialities of popular subjects.