buenoThe field that is expanding most in Brazilian post-graduation is interdisciplinary, that which sums up knowledge from diverse areas in the proposal of the construction of a new understanding or of solutions for emergent dilemmas. Today the masters and doctorate interdisciplinary programs make up the greatest area at the Tertiary Level Personnel Training Coordination (Capes), the agency belonging to the Ministry of Education charged with authorizing the creation of stricto sensu postgraduate programs in the country and evaluating them. In all there are 177 of these courses in a universe of almost 3,600. “The growth has been explosive and shows that the vision that some problems can be covered in a more efficient manner by way of the integration of various disciplines is advancing in Brazilian post-graduation”, advised Carlos Nobre, the committee’s coordinator in the Capes’ area and a researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Between 1996 and 2004 the number of interdisciplinary master’s courses went from 25 to 130. During the same period, the doctorate courses increased from 7 to 32.
Last July Capes authorized the creation of 147 new post-graduate courses in Brazil. The areas with the highest number of approved programs was Multi-Disciplinary with 18 projects, followed by Engineering II (which encompasses materials, metallurgy, mining, nuclear and chemical engineering) with 8, Medicine also with 8 and Collective Health with 7. Among the projects that got the green light there are, for example, the first professional masters course in the country in Judiciary, offered by the Law School of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) of Rio de Janeiro, whose disciplines will be ministered by specialists in administration, economics and social sciences. The object of the course is to form professionals who will help to reduce the slowness of the Judicial System and to increase efficiency in the law courts. Another example is the master’s course in defense and civil safety at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), which will be able to count upon researchers from various units of the institution such as the Engineering School and the institutes of Social Sciences, Regional Development, Geosciences, Chemistry and Community Health. The list even contains, among others contemplated, master’s courses in scientific and cultural diffusion from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in leisure from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and in nanosciences from the Franciscan University Center in Santa Maria (RS).
Two turbines that work in parallel provide the push forward in post-graduate interdisciplinary courses. One of them has to do with the new necessities of the job market and is linked to professional master’s courses, those directed towards those who do not follow an academic career but are looking for an improvement course for working in companies. But the main reason is really the need to resort to various sciences in order to confront emerging and complex dilemmas. An example is the master’s courses in gerontology, which cover the field of nursing, medicine, pharmacy, social assistance and anthropology. “Some years back we received the proposal for an interdisciplinary course in the area of public safety that then introduced the question of organized crime in the penal system and would investigate various research fields such as sociology, law and political science”, says Carlos Nobre.
Interdisciplinary practice is nothing new at the University of São Paulo (USP) – for some time now the institution has maintained a dozen master’s and doctorate interdisciplinary courses in fields such as bioengineering and bioinformatics. But the interdisciplinary aspect has been advancing even within traditional programs. In the area of physics, the master’s and doctorate courses in medical physics have the cooperation of the Medical School. “There’s also collaboration among the professors of mathematics and finance at the Economics School, and in the areas of engineering and physical education in research into bio-motor systems, just to cite two examples”, says USP’s pro-rector of post-graduation, Armando Corbani Ferraz. “This is a healthy tendency, because it makes use of competency in group projects. It’s good that one area helps another. Research can’t have limits”, he says.
Many interdisciplinary postgraduate programs are linked to environmental sciences. And this is not a coincidence. On the one hand there is an international tendency that began at the end of the 1980’s to integrate research about global changes, covering not only climatic and ecological, but also specialists capable of covering all of the complexity of the issue, such as geologists, social scientists, demographers and anthropologists. “From this interaction a new breed of professional has sprung up, capable of understanding the environmental questions in all of their aspects”, advised coordinator Carlos Nobre. An example is the Postgraduate Interunits Program (master’s and doctorate) in Applied Ecology, which was started in 2001 by the Luiz de Queiroz Upper School of Agriculture (Esalq) and the Nuclear Energy in Agriculture Center (Cena), both on the USP campus at the town of Piracicaba. Their research lines group together professors in diverse areas, from ecology to genetics, from biotechnology to the human sciences, from microbiology to entomology, in search of solutions for the conservation of biodiversity in neo-tropical agricultural agro-eco-systems.
Last year a master’s in environmental sciences program began to function in the Amazon, linked to three institutions: the Federal University of Pará, the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará and the Embrapa Eastern Amazon. The initiative was inspired by the experience of a major research project, the Large-Scale Biosphere – Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), which brought together researchers with diverse formations in order to improve climate forecasting models and to make projections about how to make use of the Amazon lands, in accordance with the objective of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Geoma program. “Pará is an open sky laboratory of environmental experiments”, says the course’s coordinator, Leonardo Sá, a researcher with the Climate Forecasting and Climate Studies Center (CPTEC), linked to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and the Emilio Goeldi Museum. The master’s course, which has already received graduates in areas such as physics, oceanography, mathematics, meteorology, agronomy, biology and even sociology, to looking to form researchers capable of studying the dynamics of the Amazonian ecosystems and of improving knowledge about climate phenomena and the changes in the use of land in the forestry region.
Around 20% of all of the course proposals that arrive at Capes are interdisciplinary. However, the majority are censured by the agency. It so happens that a good deal of them come from public and private institutions of small size or from remote regions of the country that, for lack of critical mass for carrying out programs in conventional areas, advance consortiums of professors with varied backgrounds and attempt to induce the creation of an interdisciplinary course. “Quickly one can see that there’s a lack of focus in the proposal and in truth what one is dealing with is various juxtaposed micro-programs”, says Renato Janine Ribeiro, a philosophy professor at USP and the evaluation director at Capes.
Comfort
Anyhow, the growth in these courses can be seen as a sign of vigor in post-graduation. And the creation of a program of this type involves a lot more work than the creation of another of traditional character. “It takes a lot longer to mount interdisciplinary research. How can one make certain kinds of research end in two and a half years, which is the time for a master’s course?”, questions Arlindo Philippi Júnior, a professor at USP’s Public Health School, during a debate that took place during the last meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC), in Florianópolis (SC). In his opinion, interdisciplinary practice demands an effort to abandon the comfort area in which the researcher has the dominion of ‘knowing what to do’. “But we need to think about which manner we’ll confront the dispute of space with colleagues from other disciplines”, adds Philippi.
One isn’t dealing with a trivial problem. Capes, the agency responsible for the evaluation of the programs, is concerned with some impediments that these new courses confront. “It’s difficult to evaluate an interdisciplinary postgraduate course”, says Janine Ribeiro. “The danger always exists that, at the moment of distributing resources, the evaluators will be more sensitive towards their own areas of origin and not give an adequate value to the innovation of interdisciplinary programs. This is a problem that we’re combating in all manner of ways, under the risk that we’ll produce research that only repeats already known experiences”, he says.
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