Reinventar a universidade: um ensaio sobre o Grupo de Estudos da Complexidade (GRECOM/UFRN)

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at presenting fragments from the history of a thought reform experience built throughout 25 years in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. The set of activities carried out by GRECOM – Grupo de Estudos da Complexidade within the teaching, research and extension scopes shows that it is possible to enact a university reform as proposed by Edgar Morin. The accomplishments of this academic research base widens the conception of complexity in regards to the reconnection between the scientific and humanistic cultures. Putting together a research history which precedes the birth of the research group itself, GRECOM’s coordinator Maria da Conceição de Almeida, along with and supported by a group of different researchers, extrapolates science’s frontiers and recognizes the need for establishing a dialog between distinct and complementary knowledge. By reconnecting scientific and traditional knowledge, sharing the product of its research making it available for teachers’ development environments and consolidating national and international interchanges, this academic base has come to be recognized as a nucleus for the study of complexity not only locally, but also nationally and internationally. The thesis has been built based on thinkers who are in line with the science of complexity and it has, above all, Edgar Morin as the core foundation. It also encompasses the works of scientists and philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Isabelle Stengers, Nuccio Ordine, Wilhelm Von Humboldt and Gerhard Casper, who broadly advocate open and complex knowledge when it comes to education, science and the academic ethics of research. As empirical evidence I used the group’s documental collection, which is composed of research reports, projects, books, catalogues, monographs, dissertations, theses, pictures, posters, banners, invitations and further entries of developed activities. I argue that GRECOM consists of a pod of educational and scientific principles which extrapolates what is expected from a knowledge-producing multidisciplinary group, since it not only functions in the teaching, research and extension scopes, but above all because it proposes complex method new strategies, originality in its reasoning, creativity in the production of knowledge and the end of frontiers between theory and practice, philosophy and science, professional ethics and living. From the perspective above I resort to Claude Lévi Strauss’s notion of reduced model, using it as a metaphor to narrate GRECOM’s story, thus claiming that GRECOM is, in itself, a mini-university within Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte’s larger structure and Brazilian higher education institutions.