What about Health Education?: Hegemony, paradigms in tension and alternatives

Abstract

Health Education (HE) is a field that, despite being widely—almost intuitively—regarded as crucial, is not usually addressed in other health-related fields and health research agendas, leaving its role and implications relegated (1).Both health communication and community participation in health share a similar taste, ubiquitously considered important but insistent and persistent as problematic. As Morgan once described it as a perpetual allure and a persistent challenge (2).In this article, an overview of the HE field is shared, providing a brief sample of research and key ontological and epistemological stances in order to describe HE paradigms and perspectives in tension. This typology of perspectives may help to question and analyze which HE is being—implicitly or explicitly—supported by different health initiatives. Some experiences and theories from Latin America are also shared, which may not be very well known in other geographies, and these frameworks are placed in dialogue with others fostered in the Global North. All of this we hope may contribute to discussing questions such as how can health education (HE) contribute to broader health initiatives? How is HE performed in different educational contexts? Which HE do we have and which do we want?