TRANSFERRING LEARNING METHODOLOGIES. THE CASE OF ACTIVE ROLE PLAYING EXPERIENCES IN SCIENCES HIGHER EDUCATION IN UNIJUI (BRAZIL)

Undoubtedly, the Bologna Declaration process is reporting important benefits to the European University (although there are also problems in its application) since it was signed in 1999 by most of the Education ministers in the UE to this year 2010 that is the deadline for its application. Three of the most important goals of the Bologna Declaration are the following: 1) mobility promotion 2) International Competitiveness 3) employability of our students.
Attending to the above mentioned goals, we want to remark the experiences in transferring learning - teaching methodologies developed in the UNIJUI (Universidade Regional do Noroeste do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul) – Brazil. Several activities to interchange learning experiences with teachers were developed in this university. There, we worked with people from the GIPEC (Grupo Interdepartamental de Pesquisa sobre Educação em Ciências) that were especially interested in innovative actions in science learning. They showed a great interest in our actions, strategies and methodologies of teaching-learning in the European University especially since the application of the Bologna process.
In the UNIJUI, we developed some conferences focused on engineering teachers’ formation, to talk about the European University, the Bologna Process and modern learning-teaching methodologies applicable to this field. A seminar of Ethics and Sustainability in engineering was also developed. There, we worked on the application of these transversal matters in the educational planning of Engineering Degrees (in fact we are convinced that these matters are very important and they should have more relevance in Engineering Higher Education).
In this sense, a practical seminar of applying these matters in Higher Education subjects was also developed. To get this, a practical session of active role of the students at class was done and several professors of this university, including most of the staff in science education, participated in this activity. The final results were successful: everybody showed their point of view about the state of Higher Education nowadays and several remarkable conclusions were obtained.
In the end, the results of these Brazilian experiences do not end in those showed in this paper but there are several other plans for the near future such as implementing some of the described methodologies in the science learning there in UNIJUI, especially the ones relative to seminars based on active role playing at class in order to implement ethics and sustainability matters in the modern engineers’ formation.