Shaping for the future: professionalizing higher education and implications on the scientific policies of Brazil and Portugal

Abstract

The objective of this research is to compare the idealized teaching with the teaching carried out at two Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS), the Federal Technological University of Parana (UTFPR) in Brazil and the Polytechnic Institute of Braganca (IPB) in Portugal. The UAS focus on the training of professionals through a more entrepreneurial and technical approach in close collaboration with the market, thus contributing to the regional development. The research is justified by the fact that there are few studies on how higher education organizations respond to the new demands in their local contexts without changing their conceived models. In Portugal, the higher education system is binary, whereas in Brazil there is no system designed for the technological higher education. The documentary corpus was composed of official documents and semi-structured interviews applied to the managers involved both in the process of constitution of these organizations and in their current moment. The data were analyzed by means of the Content Analysis technique (Bardin in Content analysis, editions 70. Lisbon, p 225, 1977). Firstly, this study showed that the analyzed organizations act in different ways. UTFPR, in its constitution, converged towards a vocational education and a strong relationship with the labor market. After 14 years, the concept of technological education is still under development and a distancing from the characteristics that make up teaching at UAS could be verified. While the IPB remained faithful to the polytechnic teaching model conceived in its creation, which to some extent also helped the institution achieve national and international recognition and fulfill its developmental mission. We concluded that learning and qualification practices in UAS should be increasingly based on the applicability of knowledge, in addition to the necessary involvement of social and economic actors that are formed through partnerships with industries and society. The obtained results can inform policy makers about the characteristics of these organizations so that they can create effective and diversifying policies in national contexts; as well as contribute to the development of higher education literature that explores responses to the processes of social change.