O Bacharelado Interdisciplinar em Humanidades da UFBA: inovação, formação intercultural e justiça cognitiva

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil is built in a segregationist way, focused on the middle and upper classes. The educational marginalization of most of its population is the fruit of the colonial heritage, which left practically no access to education for all those who were subordinated by the colonizer. In the realm of knowledge production, the Brazilian university has established modern science as its ultimate and supreme knowledge, thus excluding all types of knowledge "foreign" to the parameters of its scientificity. However, in recent years, a change is underway in the case of Brazil. Two milestones can be mentioned in the transformation of the exclusionary paradigm. The first is the implementation of the Support Program for Restructuring and Expansion Plans of Federal Universities (REUNI), in 2007. The second milestone is the enactment of Law No. 12,711/2012, the so-called Quotas Law. In the curricular changes encouraged by REUNI, the Interdisciplinary Bachelors (BI) represent, at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), an opportunity for curricular innovation proposing a general education in the higher education scenario. From these changes, UFBA presents gradual alterations in the ethno-racial and social profile of the students, becoming more inclusive and diverse. However, when thinking about these changes that result from the arrival of new racial-ethnic, social, sexual and gender profiles, we also need to think about the epistemological inclusion of these subjects, since they bring new pedagogical, curricular and training challenges. This qualitative work aimed to understand how the new pedagogical proposal of the BI, specifically the BI in Humanities (BIH), has contributed to the implementation of intercultural dialogue and the promotion of cognitive justice. Having as theoretical reference the decolonial studies, we used comprehensive interviews, conducted with quota-holding students, for data production. The main empirical results of the research point to the power of the BiH to promote a convergent education between interdisciplinary science and intercultural education. It becomes an effort, albeit preliminary, of the course to propose and discuss new pedagogical and theoretical proposals from different theoretical frameworks. A preambular effort, as it was observed, when analyzing the course plans, that they sin in the selection of the obligatory bibliography of the analyzed components, as they privilege certain geopolitical bodies.