“Running things through the body is always different from putting that into words, right?”: health education, interculturality and the theater of the oppressed

Abstract

We present the systematization of an in-service teacher training experience developed in 2018-2019, articulating Health Education and extended critical Interculturality, through the Theater of the Oppressed. Based on a real case, the participants created images with their own bodies that represented different situations of oppression, which were to be analyzed and intervened with collectively. We focus the systematization on three axes: knowledge, positions and reflections on Health and Interculturality; what happened when the body and feelings were put into play; and during the intervention of the images, which allowed for reflection on the possibilities of transforming reality. The systematization led us to recognize that the Image Theater approach implied a learning process developed in the practice itself, which caused multiple positions to be made explicit, including politically incorrect ones. We underline the richness of devices that enable the dimension of the transformation of reality in topics such as Health and Interculturality.

Keywords:
Health education; Interculturality; Theater of the oppressed; In-service teacher education