Towards a multi-epistemic approach to health education: reflections based on experiences from an interdisciplinary undergraduate program

Abstract

This essay addresses the challenges facing health education based on a critique of the hegemony of biomedicine and its technical approach and instrumentalization, promoting practices that distance the teaching and learning process from the complexity of health problems and care. Based on the experiences of teachers in the context of an interdisciplinary undergraduate program and drawing on theoretical reflections from critical feminist epistemology, we highlight the need to re-enchant health education, moving beyond interdisciplinarity to a multi-epistemic approach. This entails making room for other rationalities, overcoming exclusion and promoting practices guided by ethics and aesthetics that dialogue with a diversity of knowledge. We emphasize the importance of reimagining science and health education as fields capable of fostering new horizontal and counter-hegemonic approaches.