RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Specific pedagogical training for teaching in the area of health emerges with the goal of creating critical and reflective professionals and as a necessary challenge to university teaching, where there is reflection on self-awareness, consciousness, and the incompleteness of being. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to understand how Freire's critical consciousness is expressed in the pedagogical practice of health teachers. DESIGN: This study is a qualitative study that is descriptive, exploratory, and analytical. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTINGS: Twenty-one teachers from a public university in southern Brazil participated. METHODS: Data were collected using open-ended, in-person interviews held from May to December 2013. Data systematization was based on Minayo's operative proposal. RESULTS: The analysis yielded 2 main categories, including the naïve critical consciousness of health teachers, i.e., education as a practice of oppression, and the epistemological critical consciousness of health teachers, i.e., education as a practice of freedom. The results revealed the teachers' self-knowledge, including the reasoning and motivations that made them become teachers, the characteristics considered necessary to be a teacher, the teachers' feelings in their teaching practice, and the teaching preparation required for being in the classroom from the perspective of naïve and epistemological critical consciousness. CONCLUSIONS: The study shows that the self-knowledge that emerged from the teachers' reports encourages new perspectives in the construction of the teacher, raising the challenge of development and transformation from naïve consciousness to epistemological consciousness, and thus contributing to a breakthrough with respect to critical and creative teacher training.