Abstract:
The focus of this dissertation is the Theoprax method in technical and technological programs in
SENAI/Cimatec: The place of epistemology and innovation in the formation process of the
student and in the teaching practice. The Theoprax method is embodied in teaching through
projects, choosing real problems as challenging situations to mobilize significant learning in
professional and technological education. Upon approaching this theme it is relevant to mention
the interest in analyzing these programs within a multi-referential perspective, situating the
phenomenon of education within its constitutive belonging. In this sense the investigation is
mediated by qualitative and quantitative research aiming at appropriating the multiple languages
of the subjects, besides other data and information. Toward this end, it makes use of the directive
and non-directive interviews seeking to better apprehend the formative process and its
manifestations mediated by the epistemology which feeds into the Theoprax method. The place
of the epistemology takes on a meaning of the subjects belonging in their social practices. The
place has a historical meaning of critical construction based on the movement of the subjects of
the educational process in their interactions as organic intellectuals. In its turn, innovation is
translated into transformation and changes in the formation process; therefore, it presupposes a
dialog relation between students who express their interpretative comprehension and professors
who expose themselves in sensitive listening. They are subjects who join a participant research
project seeking meanings for a construction mediated by projects. The adoption of the Theoprax
method by the SENAI/BA, in this emphasis, transgresses the reductionist view centered only on
new competencies resulting from the impacts of the technological innovations in work and
reinvents itself in the complexity of the knowledge which dialogs interdisciplinarally with other
knowledges. In this way, it heads toward overcoming the practices based on the technicist and
traditional tendency of the Liberal or Conservative Pedagogy and veers in the direction of Critical
Pedagogy. For this, these transformations are carried out based on a critical awareness of the
reality. Apprehending this reality in a multi-referenced way is the path to a dialectical relation
and among other actors in education and from work. In this perspective, cooperative professional
and technological education gain a meaning of innovation, being embodied by the weaving of the
relations between the educational entity and productive entity, through resignified and new
contracts, sustained by an ethics which is expressed in social responsibility. Therefore, the
adoption of problematized teaching and by projects in professional and technological education
mediated by the Theoprax method, is an initiative of the SENAI/Cimatec, in Bahia which dares
to break new trails in professional and technological education constituting itself as the first
Reference Center in Brazil.
