Decolonial care in nursing education

experiences and knowledge from extensionist actions and memories of Traditional Birth Attendants

Abstract

This article aims reflect on ways for qualify nursing education toward a decolonial pedagogy, advocated by Catherine Walsh (2007) as a praxis based on propositional educational insurgency, representing the creation and construction of new social, political, and cultural conditions to handle with the complex populations’ health situations that require professionals with critical-reflexive capacities to act from the perspective of integral care, respecting principles of equity, autonomy, emancipation, and satisfaction.The article is part of a doctoral research on the knowledge of Traditional Birth Attendants from the ancient quilombo of Cabula territory (Salvador) and aimed to discuss how this knowledge can contribute for nurses education, reflecting on the importance of Popular Education in Health and extension actions, developed in the nursing course (Universidade do Estado da Bahia). The methodology was qualitative, including: documents analysis related to extension actions in health care of the Nursing course, conversation circles and narrative interviews with older women from the Cabula neighborhood, to rescue memories of Traditional Birth Attendants who worked in that territory until the mid-twentieth century, when childbirth became institutionalized. In this perspective, the article present a first session in which conceptual and theoretical aspects that build the reflection on the relationship between coloniality, the medicalization of childbirth and the Traditional Birth Attendants' performance are worked on, and a second session in which two possible dimensions of decolonial pedagogy in nursing are presented as results: university extension and the approximation of Traditional Birth Attendants' memories.