EDITORIAL

This issue of Trabalho, Educação e Saúde starts with Iria Brzezinski's Proceduring and unfolding of LDB/1996: clashes between opposing society and education projects. The purpose of this historical essay is to shed light on a subject that is permanently relevant to public policy: the relationship and the disputes between public and private interests and their materialization in the realms of the education policies. The scenario of the discussion refers to the 1996 LDB, and the author describes a broad overview of developments specific to this law, analyzing, among other things, the conformation of new educational institutions; curriculum issues; the redefinition of the category of education professionals and the training such workers get.

Then, the first three articles are a collection of texts that lead to reflection on education in health, with issues surrounding work as a central theme and the development of primary care as a context. Thus, the article written by Josiane Vivian Camargo et al., Continuing Education in Health as a pedagogical strategy to transform the practice: possibilities and limits proposes to discuss the implications, for the working process, of implementing the continuing education strategy put into course in Londrina. This strategy was predominantly one of distance education and, according to the authors' research, despite the difficulties pointed out in the article, it afforded a step forward in understanding the work dynamics and in expanding the participation of the professionals. Roberta Mota and Helena David's article, The increasing schooling of the community health agent: an induction of the work process?, deals with the interaction between the work and training of community health agents (CHA) from a political perspective of this interface. The authors, whose research is based on these professionals' reality in a region of Rio de Janeiro, describe their profile and map analyses pointing to professionalism issues involving of the group belonging to the popular classes who now work as CHAs. The article titled Continuing Education with nursing assistants from the Family Health Strategy in Sobral, Ceará, by Aldiania Carlos Balbino et al., emphasizes the discourse of nursing assistants, values continuing health education as a way to build the role of health professionals and, in particular, nursing professionals, understanding these processes as a condition to conform critical and interactive technical competence compatible with the Unified Health System's ethical and political horizon.

Also speaking about education, with regard to training and insofar as the relationship between health and environment is concerned, Fátima Cecchetto, Simone Monteiro and Erica Fernandes' article Training community workers in environment and health at the Juliano Moreira Colony: an ethnographic approach, parts from the perspective that an intervention, such as education, is a project that is built based on a polyphony of subjects and political actors with different interests and demands. Supported by qualitative research and ethnographic method references, the authors seek to capture several meanings constructed around the course. The analysis of the students' expectations, for example, points to the association between quality and inclusion in the labor market while identifying the ownership of knowledge offered by the course with the possibility of intervening positively on quality of life in that space.

The two final articles show different angles through which one can think about the teaching of dentistry in Brazil. In Teaching of dentistry: the post-graduate challenge in educator training, Mariângela Baltazar, Samuel Moysés and Carmen Célia Bastos provide, from a historical perspective, a solid basis for reflection on educator training, helping to understand its technical character. Moreover, the article mentions and discusses the inadequacy of the training that is provided in graduate school when it comes to qualifying a dentist to teach in a critical manner. It is around the discussion on the progress and difficulties that the process of education in dentistry is going through that Aline Guio Cavaca et al. build the research project the results of which give rise to the article titled The professor-student relationship in the teaching of dentistry at the Federal University of Espírito Santo. The investigation, in which subjects are professors and students, supports the view that the changes proposed by the new curriculum guidelines demand the reconfiguration of the teaching practices, enticing debate on the need to review the processes of pedagogical training.

The account made by Arlindo Serpa Filho and Regiane Cristina Okochi, in Training of health professionals: a pioneering experience in the state of Tocantins, takes up the issue of training and the health-environment relationship to retrieve the learning provided by this refresher course in which theoretical issues are allied to practical experience bounded by a multidisciplinary approach which has health promotion as a guideline.

Claudio Katz, in an interview made by Marcela Pronko, criticizes the new developmentalism, explores the possibilities of Latin American Marxism, and raises questions about democracy.

This issue also presents a review by Maiko Rafael Spiess, in which analyses the publication, in Brazil, of David Bloor's classic Knowledge and social imagery.

Angélica Ferreira Fonseca

Carla Macedo Martins

Isabel Brasil Pereira

Publication Dates