A few days ago I had the opportunity of, on the same day, being in the afternoon with the class of medicine at Faculdade Santa Marcelina, for the inaugural class of what will be five monthly meetings with trainers from Escola dos Doutores da Alegria and, by night, being with the third class program Madalegria from Falculdade de Medicina da USP (weekly meetings from March to December).
Both intense encounter, which instigate me on thinking about what is important to provide for a medical education. At the Madalegria class, students participated in an exercise where they should imitate, through playback, a music idol. They prepared for the activity by studying idol’s costume, ways of walking, dancing etc. Then, with a vibrant audience of fans (we trainers and other students), each idol sang the song chosen. A delicious jokeof being, for a few minutes, the idol. This exercise made me think a lot. To imitate is a essential activity to our human formation. When small, build our games and our imaginary, imitating superheroes, imitating adults in the house and jokingly imitating professions, by playing doctor. The child makes communion with the world through the gesture. It is matter to construct the grammar of our childhood. Our imagination can expand through this trial to be another and thereby won in childhood essential elements for that later, we call empathy. The gesture has a fundamental role in adolescence. In this turbulent space of discoveries, we experience various styles of talk, move, dress, departing from behavior gangly, but that give us clues to what lies within us, gestures of our essence.
The richer the possibility of experimentation, the greater the chance of finding a gesture that speaks of me. This is how, as teenagers, we found these students. In the world of formal education, a variety of gestures will thinning. We will spend, lifelong, many hours sitting and watching from our desks the world being presented to us. Responding to it through tests and grades. Our knowledge loses the ability to enrich the world with the matter of the gesture. What I saw in these young people who might be Ney Matogrosso, Marisa Monte, Seu Jorge and others, was the replacement of experimentation gesture as part of their training. Three Ney Matogrosso sang, one different from the other, according to the appropriation of gestures chosen. Gorgeous! And I say to myself: become a doctor is a set of skills, knowledge and a good deal of imitation. Here the idol may be the childhood’s doctor’, someone who cared for me or a close relative, a university professor, someone who I say: I want to be like him. “I want to be like him” is an affirmation of life, it means that something inspires me and moves me. A good question to those who are taking care of medical education is to think about how to transform the gesture, born of imitation, in a gesture that speaks of identity.
How to generate ways of appropriating a gesture for a gesture imitative own? What I have felt, as a trainer in the classroom is that this pedagogical space for genuine gesture is possible within the training of health professionals. In the activity of the idol were present all important ingredients for learning: observation, study, preparation for the activity, host for experimentation. I want to emphasize this latter topic. Do not just imitate the idol, I believe that being the idol and the audience is very important for this. It believes together, it vibrates, claps. Here, for a time, the roles are reversed structured academic: the teacher sits in the audience, operates the desk light and sound, puts the spotlight on the student: the stage is his. The image of a powerful pedagogical space. It is not to lose the place of the master, it is vital, but make it light and fluid. If so, can evoke all the childhood games they came to fruition competent physicians. Knowledge without it’s own gesture is word without an address: can be heard but does not make home.
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