Desenvolvimento local e território: uma reflexão sobre o papel dos Institutos Federais de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia

Abstract

This work started from the perception that the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology, created on December 29th, 2008, through the law number 11.892, have hard duties and challenge responsibilities concerning the Brazilian society. For this reason, we intended to analyze the role of these Federal Institutes, looking for the aims, characteristics, and drawn goals to this new institutional model, mainly regarding the themes about the local development and the territory, very discussed in the law. In face of that, we took as example to this study the school called Campus Sertão, from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul in order to verify if the educational activities are being done according to the referred law. With this in mind, the research was applied by the qualitative evaluation, with the exploratory research, through the case study, and the bibliographic research as well. A brief overview about the following topics was necessary: the history of the professional and technological education in Brazil; the Federal Network of Professional, Scientific and Technological Education as well as its spreading out; of how the Federal Institutes were constituted and, besides that, the history of Campus Sertão since its foundation. The concepts of territory and local development were also studied through several authors who carried about them, getting a better understanding within the law context. The results were presented and discussed all the way through the thinking about the articles and subsections from the Law Foundation of the Federal Institutes that deal, explicit or implicitly, with the commitment of these institutions to the socioeconomic and cultural local improvement in their enclosure area. In addition to that, this study was worried about how the teaching, the research and the extension worked out in the Campus Sertão before its incorporation to the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul and what has changed during the two years after it became an Institute. Finally, a comparative analysis was shown between the achievements by the Campus and what is still considered necessary to be done in its working method in order to reach the law demands and improve its essential role to the local and bounded growth.