Abstract:

Environmental science professionals are in high demand given the information on environmental impacts caused by human activities. However, the jobs as advisers, consultants and even government officials to make political decisions about environmental conservation; environmental law; ecological planning; uses and land use changes; ecological restoration; sustainable use of natural resources; and maximum permissible levels of pollution in general, are reserved to graduates of bachelor's degrees in biology, environmental engineering or chemical environmental (at best); and economics, sociology, anthropology, law, most of the time. From this perspective of work, environmental science professionals only have two options: 1) continue their academic career with postgraduate (masters and doctorate), and be engaged in research; They look for jobs in universities, research centers and scientific institutes; or 2) are converted into other professional changing their profile towards social sciences, law and economics, so that they learn politics, administration and decision making. Re-teaching professionals is not easy. They must change, sometimes, their entire way of thinking, how to do science and technological developments. But above all, how to make contact with society. The relevance of doctoral programs should be evaluated since the perspective of research, rather than the professional. A doctor in environmental sciences has fewer opportunities to obtain work than with an individual degree. The industry thinking is that a chemist, engineer or biologist could be trained in the company, while a doctor should already come with experience and knowledge to immediately improve the company. The graduate person is young, gains little and works hard; the doctor earns more and works like the others. The doctor, in order to be competitive, must learn how to focus his work on the comprehensive resolution of a problem, not in a particular issue; the learning process should be more open, based on experiences and take into account prior knowledge, culture, attitude and potential for change. The educational model that could work in the teaching learning process is to andragogy. Otherwise, there were no doctors in environmental science, but researchers specializing in environmental engineering, ecology or biology ... The aim of this paper is to show how andragogy has been proved to be useful in the creation and consolidation of a doctoral program in landscape heritage conservation.

Keywords:

Research projects, Andragogy, Postgraduate programmes, open classroom, social links.