A expansão da pós-graduação na universidade federal de alfenas – UNIFAL-MG

Abstract

EFOA - Escola de Farmácia e Odontologia de Alfenas – established in 1914, was firstly structured with the aim of training health professionals. Throughout its developmental history, a certain institutional culture was created, based on professional teaching, which determined the internal dynamics of the institution and, consequently, its practices. The internal dynamics established by the institution were attuned to the position it occupied in the Brazilian university field, which went through various transformations during the 20th century, especially with the institutionalization processes of research and graduate studies in the country, created a hierarchy that established the so-called knowledge-producing and knowledge-reproducing institutions. There were the universities of research and the universities of education. However, this status quo that characterized the university environment for many years passed through a process of reconfiguration, which had a great impulse with the State reforming in the 1990s and with the implementation of certain graduate studies policies, with a prominent role given to Capes. In this manner, a huge array of possibilities for new university practices were then possible to be institutionalized in UNIFAL-MG, such as new research and graduate activities. In this way, the objective of this work was analyzing the process of implementation and expansion of graduate programs and its impacts in an institution in the countryside of the state of Minas Gerais, with a marked history in the practice of undergraduate teaching. For this, we use as the main methodological instrument analysis of documental and statistical data from the Institution. The data demonstrates that new practices have effectively been institutionalized, such as research and graduate studies. A new power dynamic starts to characterize the strength relations in the institution. UNIFAL-MG, this microcosm with its own laws and rules, turns into a center of discussion of the assembled hegemony on its environment. As a theoretical framework, we used Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of field, habitus and capital. As Catani (2013, p.60) asserts, it is no use reflecting these concepts separately, since one complements the other. The field is a relatively autonomous social space, an integral part of a broader field, which we consider the field of power, habitus are structuring and structured structures, that is, how the agents present in this environment appropriate of certain types and ways of thinking, these being a mixture of their academic formation, life history and the institutional identity in which they are immersed, and the capital, a way of understanding the meanings that the agents of the field attribute to certain questions when they assume their position in this universe.