Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In Brazil, service learning or community service is an integral part of every university’s fundamental duties, along with teaching and researching. The type of learning or service to be provided, however, depends on the hermeneutics applied, which can either lead to community empowerment and socio-technical change or to mere paternalism. In the early 2000’s, during the two terms of Lula as president of Brazil, many community service/ service learning teams were established and institutionalized, linked to engineering courses and faculty members. From the conjugation of the social technology and solidarity economy movements, some of these teams developed a form of engineering practice that is now called grassroots engineering. In this manuscript, along with a brief recall of the most important facts concerning the emergence of Brazilian grassroots engineering (GE), I will: 1) present three of the GE’s current leading teams; 2) discuss some of the theoretical and methodological basis of GE; 3) analyze some of the impacts of GE on both supported community and involved students; 4) highlight the main aspects of the formation process provided to students; and 5) discuss some potentialities and limitations of GE. For doing so, I will draw on different GE teams’ publications, interviews with some leading grassroots engineers, and my personal perception as a member of the GE network, Repos.
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--34176
Author: Cristiano Cruz
Institution: Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
Award: G6899037903
OpenAlex ID: W3090290241