Teaching in higher engineering courses

conceptions, perspectives, and challenges

Abstract

This article aims at identifying the concept of teaching guided by the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) of undergraduate Engineering courses, as well as its level of influence on Pedagogical Course Projects (PPC) of an academic engineering unit of Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA). This is a documentary research involving the mentioned documents. The study comprises a qualitative approach. The content analysis of Bardin (1977) was the methodological path taken to understand the object, which enabled, through coding, categorization, and critical positioning, the possibility of the results’ inference and interpretation. The results reveal that there is a fragmentation in the engineer training privileging the technical-professional dimension, whereas the scientific, cultural, and political dimensions, which are fundamental to human training, are refrained. Therefore, teaching is conceived and guided according to a conservative and elitist logic that has the purpose of separating people who conceive from the ones who perform, through the projection of skills and abilities that are introduced in the DCN by business groups subsidized by International Organizations (OI), which are passively accepted by Engineering courses without any innovation or advances, beyond the prescribed skills and only related to marketing needs. As a consequence, teaching and the teaching and learning process in engineering serve right the purposes of the Capital.