Políticas educacionais e internacionalização da educação superior: complexidade, impactos e desafios

Abstract

This essay aims to reflect on the processes of internationalization and their impacts on educational policies, mainly on higher education. The theme we discuss is relatively new, complex and full of contradictions. It is inserted in a qualitative approach and based on the bibliographic research through a national and international literature. The increasing mobility, especially among students and countries, reveals unprecedented levels requiring for new positions from institutions and countries. The article discusses existing appeals for the internationalization process pointing mistakes that may arise from the increase of the competitiveness, from the commodification of knowledge or from a new colonialism of the developed countries over the peripheral ones. The object of this study is the increasing initiatives of exchanges between high education institutions and countries, focusing on issues about unwanted relationships of domination and neocolonialism, and advocating an intercultural dialogue. The work must have its agenda in the dialogue amongst cultures, highlighting the autonomy of the university and the solidarity amongst the people, facing it as a social field that stimulates the production of international knowledge. The academic scenario seems not to care much about the impacts and influences of the internationalization. Thus, it is a responsibility of researchers and intellectuals who are involved with the university – space of knowledge’s genesis, as well of its circulation and reconstruction – to alert about the vigilance and perception of contemporaneous facts, mainly those who come from other territories but promote significant impacts on ways to be and to do of the universities.