A Contribution For Engineering Education In Brazil

In 1996 the Education Ministry of Brazil published the Federal Law no. 9.394 known as LDB – Basis and Directress Law of Education. With this new Law it started the educational reforms with the objective of increasing the quality of 3rd Grade in the Country. Although the reforms are associated to a political project of the present team of Republic, the real motivation is due to the consequences of a new social and technical post industrial paradigm recognized simply as: Globalization. Among all the characteristics of this new productive model, the most interesting one may be the intense use of information technology as an aggregation factor of people and markets. Immersed in this context of international integration of deep and radical changes in society and in the producing system, that the engineering project of SENAC School of Engineering and Technology has emerged. It is a Telecommunication Engineering Program, which contains in its curricula the "free period". It is called so because it is the time that the students can attend classes in the several other areas of knowledge, in one of the Units of SENAC. They are free to choose among the many options like environment issues, nursery, photography, gastronomy, languages, arts and etc. They can choose as many areas as they want along the five years, at least one per two years. At the end of each period they present a report about their development in those areas. The reports are discussed with a group of a psychologist, a pedagogue, an engineer professor and the coordinator of the course. This added to the basic science courses, basic engineering courses and specific engineering courses.