Cinema: an humanist and pedagogical tool for themes in Health-Education. The experience of CineSocial

Abstract

Study design: The approach to the research was qualitative. Objective: we used the audiovisual resources (movies) to make teachers, students and health professionals reflect, discuss and updatesocial subjects relevant to health and education. Methodology: The Project was structured as a coursewith five meetings that took place between 2008 August and December. Subjects relevant to PublicHealth and Education were focused (hunger, school violence, teenage pregnancy, health-disease process and teenage drug abuse); for each theme, specialists were invited. The instrument used to acquirethe participant perceptions was a questionnaire with 14 semi-structured questions and at the end ofeach meeting, a report was requested. A Thematic analysis of narrative was conducted with the materialfrom the individual reflection report. Results: The meeting had the presence of 49 participants (undergraduates, public teachers, health professionals, graduates and professors). In the analysis of thenarrative open question material from the individual reflection report, we could identify two sets of categories: the first one identified was the participants' expectancy before beginning the CineSocial project andthe second one identified was the participants' opinions about the course relevance. Discussion andConclusions: The cinema use enabled knowledge flow and experience diffusion; it also corroborated theidea that not only documentaries and fiction films could express the knowledge aimed by Science, butother types of cinema as well. Focusing on cinema was not the priority of this experience, the priority wasfocus on life, society, school, exclusion, current subjects present inside or outside of the school.