Learning to care and professional care (I). Some thoughts on the political and gender nature of pedagogy and the practice of care
Section: TEACHING TO LEARN
Authors
José Luis Medina Moya
Position
Diplomado en Enfermería. Doctor en Pedagogía. Profesor Titular en la Facultad de Pedagogía de la Universidad de Barcelona.
Contact email: jlmedina@ub.edu
Abstract
This paper explains the current state of the disciplinary and theoretical speech of Nursing, which is still submerged and dissolved within biomedical knowledge, despite enjoying good references in the field literature and a vast theoretical plurality. To understand and make such paradox intelligible, two of the factors that have influenced in its constitution are presented. First, we will be looking at the power relationship that accompany any process of discursive elaboration and that have legitimized the hegemony of empiric-analytical and technocratic visions of health and disease, embodied by the biomedical model. Secondly, we will explain that sexism in the health system is a reflection of society’s sexism and that the status of nursing subordination with regard to medicine is owed to the naturalization of socially constructed oppression forms, a speech whereby hierarchical structures are transformed and privilege of biologically mediated differences. The aim is to make the attempts made by groups who detect the power in the health system visible. Such groups attempt to associate the functions of nursing to biologically feminine virtues as a way to justify the low status of nursing in the health system. However, such low status is certainly not ascertainable to intrinsically feminine qualities or of a logical nature. It is directly attributable to a vast social prejudice or stereotype.
This paper is an attempt to go beyond, taking it from the world of supposedly objective and true facts that embodies the universe of the “non discussed”, of the accepted as natural and immovable in an non critical manner. This non reflexive universe is the reference framework of those who live in a world without questioning its facticity. In such non critical and codified relation with the social world, social order and the health and educational and economic-political order, this non reflexive world is not perceived as conventional or as a possibility among many others but as self evident, that is, that it works independently for each individual. The legitimacy of this world of facts and its power arise from a wrong perception, emerging from a lack of knowledge of the arbitrary nature of any social construction of reality (1).
Keywords:
discipline; conceptual framework; power relationshipshegemony
Versión en Español
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