Reflections on teaching and learning processes in chronic diseases: what kind of methods to describe these processes?

Abstract

The chronic aspects of diabetes underscore self-care dimension as an important element for maintaining quality of life of patients. For this, health practitioners dedicate hours for teaching diabetic patients in health education settings. We consider teaching and learning as a social and cultural situation that involves many dimensions and tensions between actors. In this contribution, we aim to discuss these practices based on methods of clinic of activity. Self-confrontation interviews with 1 doctor and 2 nurses and semi-structured interviews with 5 patients from a health education setting located in the East region of vaud, Switzerland, suggest that health education cannot be reduced to a mere process of information dissemination between two individuals endorsing asymmetric roles. It can be seen as a distributed and collective process demanding a complex work of coordination and adjustment from actors. Hence the needs for methods taking into account the richness of these different points of view