Desafios e perspectivas da formação e profissionalização do economista ecológico: o caso da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)

Abstract

The undergraduate course in Ecological Economics, which is functioning inside the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) since 2015, is remarkable for its pioneerism and demands permanent as well as constant self-reflection from its teachers and students. This work addresses a set of relatively broad aspects that are considered challenging in the current collective situation of those involved with the course. Its general objective is to organize an overview of those challenges from the undergraduates’ and graduates’ (now professional Ecological Economists) point of view. Its specific objectives revolve around producing evaluations about the main challenges identified: the concretization of epistemic and pedagogical interdisciplinarity; the curricular structure of the course, with its virtues and flaws; the teachers’ behaviors and its consequences; the offered (or not offered) training in basic sciences etc. The chosen methodology is a combination of the dissertation technique, the structured questionnaire and the analysis of the obtained answers, therefore constituting opinion research. The work builds upon a previous text which addressed similar themes within the format of an opinion article. The first part of the results section organizes the answers obtained through the structured questionnaire, while the second part reevaluates the original points/arguments in light of the now available collective perception of both graduates and undergraduates. The reevaluation of the original points concludes that most of it was aligned with the collective perception of those involved, thus making it a solid statement of a legitimate, collective overview about the undergraduate course and the Ecological Economist professional, instead of the opinion of just one person. The work provides a set of next steps and urgent measures to be taken as consequences of the analysis: the implementation of an instance to deliberate about the aspects discussed; the making of a narrative document about the history and the challenges of the undergraduate program, provided that a student takes part in its production; the making of a guide with suggestions to help undergraduates make better use of their free optative coursehours – the guide’s goal being to solve the academic difficulties identified throughout the work, mainly concerning the learning of economics theories and tools.