“Inclusive education is what can bring me closer to fraternity, equality, participation, citizenship. Inclusion has a lot to do with feeling part of a community. It’s about working on differences so that they don’t become inequalities”, said David Rodrigues, professor at the Technical University of Lisbon, last Thursday (15), in the space of (EA)² (Teaching and Learning Support Space), from Unicamp.
The event “Inclusive Education and Expressive Pedagogies” was part of the GraduAção program, run by the Dean of Undergraduate Studies (PRG), which aims to promote reflection on university pedagogy and innovative educational strategies. “These are contents linked to the very conception of university teaching, issues of methodologies, pedagogical and organizational practices for student learning”, explained Soely Polydoro, Coordinator of (EA)² and professor at the Faculty of Education (FE) at Unicamp.
According to her, inclusive education is one of the assumptions of this debate. “Inclusion has been an object of study and research at the university for a long time. The university has been very active in defending and offering elements for this discussion. However, it is being worked on more slowly on the university floor, in curricula and in the classroom,” she stated. The professor cited initiatives such as the Accessibility Laboratory (LAB), the Brazilian Sign Language Translators and Interpreters Center (TILS) and the Executive Directorate for Human Rights, as important actions of the university.
Drawing attention to the rapid changes in the job market, David Rodrigues stated that universities should seek to train more diverse professional profiles. “If we have this multifaceted idea of what a professional profile is, perhaps we will more easily be able to find a place for inclusion at the university”, he pointed out. He also highlighted meritocracy and the pressure for high knowledge production as specific challenges for inclusion in the university context.
For him, teachers have more difficulties than other teachers in working cooperatively and rethinking assessment methodologies. “University professors have a much more univocal idea of what assessment is. Outside the university, professors think about assessment in a different way,” he reported.
“Education to be equitable and inclusive needs to change its methodologies. It no longer allows for there to be a methodology that is exclusionary, a methodology that is designed for an average of students”, stated Luzia Mara Lima Rodrigues, from the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (Portugal), who was responsible for the practical part of the event, such as the workshop “ Expressive Pedagogies in University Teaching”.
According to Luzia, traditional methodologies limit the teacher's possibilities of discovering potential and skills in students. “When I am in an exclusively linguistic or logical-mathematical logic, the only way I can show the teacher that I know is by doing an math or writing”, he pointed out. Through other methodologies, according to her, it is possible to promote cooperation between students and allow them to show in other ways what they know and think.
For the executive director of Human Rights at Unicamp, Néri de Barros Almeida, who attended the event, the debate adds concreteness to the conversation around human rights at the university. “Human rights are in the classroom in respect of rights, first and foremost. A person has the right to education and professional training. The teacher has an obligation to filter all his practices to become sensitive to the demands that the class, in its specialties, presents to the training process”, stated Neri.
