WORK ACTIVITY AS A WAY OF MAINTAINING TEACHER’S HEALTH: AN ERGOLOGIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This article is the product of a qualitative study that discussed strategies for health maintenance by teaching. For this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six elementary school teachers from two schools in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte – MG who did not need sick leave since they started working as teachers in those institutions. The increasing statistics of physical and emotional disorders that reach that category, triggering successive requests for sick leave and even abandonment of the profession, as well as the need for solutions to the phenomena, justifies its implementation. Its general purpose was to find out which strategies were used by these teachers for health maintenance. The reports were analyzed based on the ergologic referential proposed by Yves Schwartz and his team. Based on this perspective it was possible to conclude that "healthy teachers" constantly create and recreate strategies to solve problems in everyday work. In the confrontation between subjectivity and history of labor standards, educators produce renormalizations that explain their success in the struggle for the pursuit and maintenance of health.

Key words: Teaching. Previous standards. Renormalizations. Coping strategies.