Políticas educativas e ensino superior análise da internacionalização no contexto de trabalho da profissão acadêmica em Portugal

Abstract

É no quadro da crescente europeização das políticas educativas que as últimas e importantes transformações legislativas geradas no sistema de ensino superior português têm de ser entendidas. Convergente com a criação do Espaço Europeu de Educação Superior (EEES) Portugal, aliou-se ao processo de Bolonha e reformou, na segunda metade da década de 2000, o seu sistema de ensino superior nas estruturas e nos modos de governo das instituições. Considerando, que a profissão académica é um elemento central na missão da universidade (WILSON 1962; ALTBACH, 2011), logo também central na construção do EEES. O objetivo deste artigo, é analisar, de que forma as novas políticas educativas produziram alterações no contexto e nas condições de trabalho dos professores/investigadores das universidades públicas em Portugal. Inicia-se o texto, identificando as principais medidas políticas que formam a nova moldura legal da educação superior, dando particular destaque ao novo Estatuto da Carreira Docente. Parte-se depois para a análise das percepções dos académicos em torno do desenvolvimento da profissão académica ocorrido ao longo dos últimos 40 anos articulando-as com a dimensão da internacionalização da educação superior. Os resultados obtidos permitem afirmar que a profissão académica é por natureza internacional. No entanto, essa natureza complexificou-se e diversificou-se redimensionando a internacionalização, passando esta de uma ‘lógica de opcionalidade’ para uma ‘lógica de obrigatoriedade'.

(Un)professionalisation or (Re)professionalisation of the Academic in the Brave New World?

“…For a long time, the vocation of the academic profession usually involved research and teaching (Arimoto, 2015;Galego, 2016;Santos, Pereira, & Lopes, 2016;Sethy, 2018). Santos et al (2016), in their study, stress the intensification of the academic work, concomitant with the fragmentation of the profession, in a context in which What makes the nature of the university today is the commercial ideology: universities are companies; education is services; teaching and research are business opportunities; teachers are service professionals or consultants; students are clients.…”

“…The idea of a new type of -academic management‖ according to the market and the students' future employability, in which bureaucratic administration is one of its main lines (Galego, 2016;Santos, Pereira, & Lopes, 2016) is considered by Nóvoa (2018) as a -modernisation‖ defined by Employability, Excellence, Corporisation and Entrepreneurship.…”

“…Raising funding has become an end in itself, perverting all logic of cooperative international research (Galego, 2016, p. 27). Galego (2016) even argues that this profession, which, not so long ago, had an elitist status, is currently suffering from ills such as precariousness and marginality, and adds that the profession, which was before widely sought and desired, now causes some disenchantment with those who exercise it, and is no longer at the top of the preferences of many graduates when they enter the labour market. At the basis of this disenchantment is, according to Galego (2016, p. 27), -The expansion of the functions of the academic profession, [which] inevitably contributes to the reconfiguration of the academic profession by promoting new (um)balances between its main functions -teaching and research -with an overvaluation of research over teaching‖.…”

“…However, when the analysis is made at the micro level, it cannot always be considered a single type of teaching profession with the same features given the new configurations (Galego, 2016). This is the case of the study by Winkel, van der Rijst, Poell and van Driel (2018), who, in the analysis of 18 academics at a Dutch new university, found six comprehensive academic identities that reflect participants' personal academic objectives: (1) the ‗continuous learner'; (2) the ‗disciplinary expert';…”

“…However, higher education in Portugal -and in a large part of Europe -has undergone and is undergoing a number of profound transformations in the management and self-regulation of academic activity, with the Bologna process and the resulting convergence in a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (Santos, Pereira, & Lopes, 2016;Galego, 2016;Sá, Machado-Taylor, & Carvalho, 2018). These shifts are also happening all over the world and translates into the need for internationalisation, harmonisation between countries, regions and even at the global level (Shaker, 2016).…”