Os sentidos e significados da formação em engenharia de controle e automação (ECA) da Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR): uma análise com egressos

Abstract

The research has as its object of study the senses and meanings of engineering education for graduates of the Control and Automation Engineering (ECA) course at the Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR), Curitiba campus. It was assumed that the conventional model of university education in engineering in Brazil is not capable of providing students with a complete professional education connected to the reality of the world of work, which promotes a critical discussion about the relationship between science and technology. And society and that overcomes the theory-practice dichotomy and the deterministic conception of scientific and technological knowledge – classified as neutral, autonomous and universal. Based on González Rey’s Qualitative Epistemology and on authors with a historical-dialectical materialist approach and in the field of studies in Science, Technology and Society (CTS), the research aimed to: debate issues related to technoscience in the context of engineering in Brazil; identify problems, points of contradiction and potentialities of engineering education; and to expand the areas of meaning on the formation of the professional identity of engineers in Brazil. The investigation path consisted of a bibliographic and documentary research and field research, through semi-structured interviews with ten graduates of ECA from UTFPR, graduated between 2016 and 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social isolation decreed by the health authorities during the course of the research, the interviews took place remotely, with audio and image recorded. This research is justified due to the lack of studies that problematize university education in engineering in Brazil from the perspective of graduates, or even for the specific area of Control and Automation Engineering and from a qualitative epistemological approach, that is, that advocates the subjective singularity of both the researcher and the researched subjects. The results indicate that the current university education in engineering in Brazil does not understand the social dimensions of technoscientific development and the training process itself, and how these mutually strengthen each other in modern capitalist societies, making it difficult for engineering graduates to recognize their professional and the role of the profession in the reproduction of class society. However, we also identified that the training process in engineering is marked by contradictory and differentiated experiences capable of expanding the senses and meanings of engineering education, for example, through motivating relationships between teacher and student, the contextualization of the knowledge of the professional reality, of internship activities in which the student can identify with the profession, or even through the restricted opportunity of student exchange.