Brazilian grassroots engineers' education: Achievements, flaws, and challenges

Abstract

In the early 2000s, a particular form of engineering practice emerged in Brazil. It is called grassroots engineering (GE) and articulates the social technology and solidarity economy movements. GE is one of the latest university offspring of Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. It is precisely from Freire's ideas that GE gets not only part of its own name (grassroots or popular) but also the fundamentals of its very working. Based on that, back in 2008, three engineers coined a concept that became the identification of a professional profile capable of GE: educator engineer. A profile that, besides the regular technical skills and knowledge usually developed/learned in the engineering courses, also encompasses: empathy, ability to dialogue, critical sense, and openness to learn from local (or grassroots/traditional) knowledge. To achieve this profile, different pedagogic approaches and activities have been developed in many Brazilian universities. In this manuscript, after presenting a brief account on grassroots engineering's history, I will: 1) analyze the four non-technical skills of grassroots/educator engineers, making explicit their Freirian roots; 2) present the three main engineering education approaches (and corresponding activities) aimed at the development of (part of) grassroots engineer's skills; and 3) highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each as well as the challenges each has to face to get the desired result. For so doing, I will mainly draw on academic papers, some institutional documents, and my perception as a member of the GE network.