School philosophy and health: an investigation beyond common sense

Abstract

The way philosophy is taught in school does not include dialogue with health, which is a gap in the philosophy-teaching-health relationship. Thus, the present research seeks to answer the following research question: How can the teaching of school philosophy become a field of reflections favorable to health promotion? The working hypothesis proposes that a defragmented teaching of philosophy in the high school, of holistic character, would have the potential to promote debates on health as a quality of life. Thus, the general objective of the study is to investigate the potentiality of teaching scholar philosophy in interface with health. The methodology employed, as a resource of qualitative analysis, is anchored in the data triangulation model, combining the empirical approaches brought by the interviews and observations, critical readings of legal, curricular and pedagogical documents pertinent to the problem and the theoretical-conceptual plan, which contemplates Foulcault’s notion of “clinic”, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “corporeality,” and the concept of “health” according to Almeida-Filho and Ferguson, in a holistic and transdisciplinary perspective. Preliminary results indicate that this vision is not yet significantly adopted by teachers in theoretical and practical terms, constituting an important gap in the research field.