Health in curricular proposals for the teaching of physical education in the Brazilian Northeast: what to teach?

Abstract

Parallel to the discussion of conceptual issues regarding health, some pedagogical proposals and curricular conceptions were developed in Physical Education in Brazil in the 80’s, which represented a breakthrough in the academic field. Meanwhile, a detachment of most of the proposals, regarding health as a teaching subject in school, came over. So, we ask: nowadays would the state curriculum proposals indicating health as a theme for Physical Education? Under what health perspective would be grounded these documents? How has this theme been translated to Physical Education lessons? To seek for answers, we conducted a survey in the curriculum proposals for Physical Education in northeast of Brazil. We use the thematic content analysis and realized that health is a prime topic in some proposals at the same level of corporal practices, being structured by themes, teaching content and content underlying other topics of corporal practices. We noted that both in intentions and proposals, health revolves predominantly around the healthy habits in anatomical physiological perspective, as, paradoxically, intentions and proposals share the concept of health in a public health perspective.