Acordos de Cooperação Acadêmica Internacional na Fronteira: caso Unipampa/Campus Santana do Livramento

Abstract

This research analyzed how the International Academic Cooperation Agreements are established at the Federal University of Pampa - Unipampa, campus Santana do Livramento and instigated to answer the contributions of these Agreements to educational innovation. This is a research with a qualitative approach, exploratory and descriptive in nature. Due to the reality of the researcher and the locus of the investigation, the research also constitutes a case study to better investigate the context, making a deeper and more situated analysis. Stephen J. Ball's Policy Cycle was used, contributing to discussions about the contexts of educational policy: influence, production of the policy text and policy practice. For this purpose, data collection took place through document analysis and online semi-structured interviews. The analysis was carried out in three Unipampa documents: General Regiment, Institutional Plan for Internationalization and the Institutional Development Plan (2019-2023); and semi-structured interviews with the coordinators of Daeinter and directors of Campus Santana do Livramento/Unipampa. Discursive Textual Analysis was used to interpret the data, correlated with theoretical references. Authors who share the same theoretical-critical foundation regarding the conception of internationalization of Higher Education, pedagogical innovation, international organizations, academic cooperation and frontier zones served as support for writing. It was concluded that Unipampa recognizes the importance of internationalization as a way to improve the quality of education, but there is still a lack of institutional alignment for the formalization of cooperation agreement actions. It also perceives the university as a means of mobilizing actions and knowledge production in different social spaces. It enabled the expansion of knowledge about internationalization and fostered reflections on educational innovation as an instrument that should be included in the International Academic Cooperation Agreements. For this, expand and strengthen inter institutional relations, especially in the neighboring country, boosting regional and local development.Thus, valuing the multicultural binational scenario in which the University is located, contributing to the formation of more democratic and collaborative spaces between countries with regard to the expansion and qualification of Higher Education.