Atividade curricular de integração entre ensino, pesquisa e extensão (ACIEPE) : anseios, conjunturas e contornos de inovações curriculares em movimento.

Abstract

This research describes and discusses about the conjuncture and the movements of the program so-called as Curricular Integration Activity between Teaching, Research and Outreach (ACIEPE) since its implantation in Sao Carlos Federal University from year 2002 up to 2006, analyzing in a focused way one of its proposals. During the investigation the information have been acquired by interviews with the Program s idealizers and executers, also by the Program s (ACIEPE) documents, questionnaires applied to the coordinators of the program proposals, the registries of one of the program s proposal meetings and by interviews realized with the participants of this experience. The ACIEPE Program had been created during a period in which UFSCar was trying to consolidate itself as a University based on the concepts of democratic participation, academic competence and Social commitment, a perspective that contested the neoliberal politics, which, has occupied a large area into University space. The implantation of the program occurred within a period in which UFSCar s graduation courses were passing through a curriculum reformulation process that began since the establishment of Brazilian Universities Institutional Valuation Program (PAIUB). Initially, the ACIEPE was incorporated to the courses s curriculum as an elective discipline, lately, within the curricular flexibilization, it happened to be a complementary curricular activity. Within the period comprehended between the years 2002-2006, 49 different proposals were done, some of them were re-offered, and now 107 classes can be counted in. New projects of ACIEPEs have been offered each semester (at least five), at the same time, new professors have adhered to different proposals of ACIEPEs demonstrating that the program have been recognized as an opportunity for curricular innovation. Because of the thematics that were chosen, the outreach guidelines, the external public and the methodological approaches, the ACIEPEs presented different faces, which made it different from traditional academic spaces. The proposals of ACIEPEs were consolidated as educative spaces; constituted especially by multidisciplinary teams, which involved learning and professors from distinct majors. In those spaces the formation offered to the graduation students could embrace things beyond the society of the knowledge, involving aspects like citizenship, social equality, environment sustainability, social cooperation, Human values and etc., increasing the student s knowledge experiences, which includes the interaction with different social groups. The practice of the inseparability between teaching, research and outreach at ACIEPEs occurred in a diffuse and incipient manner, overall, when it comes to the interlocution between university and External community. Focusing on one of the experiences of the ACIEPE program entitled as The comprehension about biological knowledge essence and its relationship with Science and biology on Basic Education it could have been evidenced that the ACIEPEs program s intentions were approximately reached, especially the ones related to the construction of a space that could give to the graduation students also professional education and citizenship, even, establishing a strong link between University and several social segments. At the same time, this ACIEPE, basing on its specific objectives and on the perspective of complexity, can be denominated, besides its own limitations, as a curricular innovation, based on the construction of dialogue spaces among the disciplines, whereas it made possible to the participants, especially, the biology teachers and the undergraduate level students of biological sciences course, to find a new significance for the nature of biological knowledge trough the articulation with Philosophy and sociology.