Formação para docência nos programas de pós-graduação Stricto sensu no campo da Alimentação e Nutrição no Brasil

Abstract

We herein addressed the teaching education offered to master s degree and doctoral students in Stricto sensu Postgraduate Programs in Food and Nutrition (F&N) in Brazil based on the concepts of scientific field, symbolic capital, symbolic power, symbolic violence and habitus by Pierre Bourdieu, as well as on Michel Foucault s concepts of power, knowledge/learning and discourse. We analyzed the curricular proposals of 22 Nutrition Programs controlled by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), by assuming that curriculums can be understood as texts, which, in their turn, can be understood as discourses. These proposals are available in the Sucupira Platform and in CAPES Indicators Booklet (2012/2014). The documentary analysis was guided by the following questions: what is the articulation among Postgraduate Program aims, the desired egress profile and the curricular structure of these programs in teacher education? How is teacher education signified in Stricto sensu Postgraduate Programs in F&N? Overall, the discourse in postgraduate programs comply with the principles of the National Postgraduate System focused on training higher-education teaching professionals and researchers. We perceived several strategies developed by postgraduate programs to increase the so-valued productivity. Given the evaluation process by CAPES, such productivity is the main weapon for the competitive struggle between programs and between individual social agents in them. The subjection of social agents (whether institutional - universities, or individual - professors and students) to rules external to the field and to the regulatory power of both the State and the Market is associated with playing the game . It is the way to accumulate symbolic capital, to exercise symbolic power and to remain in the competition. Instrumental topics such as planning (class, educational, teaching plan) and teaching methodology (style, strategies, techniques) prevail in teacher-education disciplines; however, there is poor theoretical reflection substantiation and little focus on learning. Based on our findings, teacher education in these Programs is reduced to procedures and technical means to achieve the desired results. It is a practice based on field competition traits limited by discursive control and power (discipline and regulation) technologies, developed amid production and competition habitus. We noticed the consolidation of a teaching identity movement that does not create the right conditions to allow future teachers to give meaning to the world surrounding them, to expand the debate about different concepts in the Food and Nutrition field and to think about the contradictions and complexity of such field. It is necessary setting stronger theoretical backgrounds to address teaching knowledge, to stimulate rule denaturalization and to reason about how individuals who speak in and about the world set their power/knowledge games, and how individuals can find other ways to be in the world