Entre a estrutura, a estratégia e o discurso: uma análise das práticas do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Direito da UFPR

• Ano de defesa: 2011
• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Maria Cecília Barbosa
• Orientador(a): Castro, Marta Luz Sisson de
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Porto Alegre
• Palavras-chave em Português: EDUCAÇÃO; ENSINO SUPERIOR - AVALIAÇÃO; DIREITO - PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/2844

The CAPES evaluation system was developed more than thirty years ago and although the model has undergone modifications throughout this time, there are few studies that address this issue. The academic community even recognizes some limitations in the evaluation model but, avoids deviating themselves from the established parameters. This creates a paradox: because the evaluation is done by peers, many researchers that recognize the limitations of the system continue to perpetuate it. This occurs because the scientific community often sees “academic excellence” as an external objective reality, or a goal to be pursued with deliberate strategic actions and not as a social construction legitimized by individual and group practices and discourses. From this context, the researcher presents the following thesis: the concept of academic excellence, used as the parameters for the evaluation of CAPES, is a social construction that results in a complex set of practices by actors interacting in a process that involves several mediations and that uses discourse as an input and element of legitimation. The overall goal of the research was to identify the practices of professors, students and managers of the Post-Graduate Law Program, as a way of maintaining the standard of academic excellence as defined by CAPES. The study was developed from the following central question: what are the practices that support the concept of academic excellence achieved by a post-graduate program in law? The investigation has a qualitative nature and is guided by a perspective in which symbolic interactionism prevailed. As a research strategy, the Post-Graduation Law Program at the Federal University of Paraná was selected as a case study, a program that since 2001 has been evaluated with a grade 6 by CAPES. The study is based on a theoretical approach that they propose to overcome the dichotomy of objectivity-subjectivity. Primary data was collected through interviews with professors, students and managers of the program. The research also used, as sources of evidence, institutional documents, CAPES evaluation reports, and the observations of the researcher. The study concluded that the field of legal science is a social space structured according to a distribution of power that involves various types of capital. Given this context, the actors move through this social space adopting practices and social patterns of behavior, in which the academic interests and the interests of technical-professionals overlap. These practices are legitimized by rhetoric in defense of tradition and the right to identity. The social practices have therefore been able to sustain the standard of excellence established by CAPES.