Education as a fundamental right: Paredes de Coura - a portuguese experience highlights “the discovery of being a child in rural areas”

Abstract

This article presents a case study describing and analyzing community actions in education and health, carried out in a rural Portuguese region, in the  1980s and in which the impact of the concepts and ideas developed by Paulo Freire is observed. Freirean concepts such as awareness, underpinned the conduct of the activities of a group of public health professionals, who worked with populations in situations of social vulnerability, with the aim of improving their quality of life, emphasizing their potential for self development in community actions. The report presented here is part of the set of studies that deal with the circulation of ideas and pedagogical knowledge between different cultural groups and how this circulation is reframed and appropriated in different ways in different spaces and times. The narrative structure adopted assuming, in their descriptive and analytical processes, the voices of different professionals in their points of view and perceptions brings the polysemy of the experiences of a multiprofessional team in the execution of a process in which at the time the force of a community organization, also professionals became agents of social transformation.