O mestrado profissional como política educacional: o caso do PPGP-UFJF à luz do ciclo de políticas

Abstract

The institutionalization of professional master’s programs, initiated three decades ago, represents a significant milestone in the stricto sensu graduate education policy in Brazil, introducing new regulatory logics centered on the applicability of knowledge, in-service training, and responsiveness to social demands. The field of Education joined this process only in 2009 and, since then, has consolidated its presence with 52 professional master's programs currently operating in the country. This thesis aims to analyze how the policy of professional master’s programs in education is formulated, textualized, and institutionalized, taking as a case study the Professional Graduate Program in Public Education Management and Evaluation at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (PPGP-UFJF). The study is grounded in the theoretical framework of the policy cycle (Bowe, Ball, and Gold, 2017) and in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001), adopting a qualitative, documentbased approach focused on the discursive reading of institutional texts that materialize educational policy in its concrete form. The analytical path is structured across three interpretative contexts. In the context of influence, the political and normative frameworks underpinning the emergence of professional master’s programs and their incorporation into the national graduate education system are reconstructed, highlighting legitimacy disputes, tensions with the academic model, and the valorization of a technical-applied rationality associated with public management. In the context of policy text production, the Evaluation of the New Course Proposal (APCN), the Internal Regulations, and the CAPES Quadrennial Evaluation Report are examined to identify the meanings ascribed to professional training, the prescribed modes of action for educational managers, and the discursive strategies used to legitimize the program. The analysis reveals the coexistence of a discourse of situated professionalization (committed to the specificities of educational management) and elements of a managerial rationality that structures competencies, intervention standards, and internal regulatory mechanisms. In the context of practice and inferred effects, based on the General Course Report and the CAPES Evaluation Report, evidence of formative practices, concrete actions of articulation with public networks, pedagogical strategies, and scientific production are identified, as well as the effects represented in the institutional documents themselves. The analysis reveals that this training policy is increasingly subjected to a regime of performativity, in which responsiveness to evaluation metrics and adherence to accountability devices become dimensions of its textualization. Although the program seeks to affirm a distinctive formative ethos oriented toward the public exercise of educational management, the CAPES evaluation mechanisms and its affiliation with the CAEd Foundation operate as vectors of symbolic regulation. It is concluded that the PPGP-UFJF constitutes an educational policy in dispute, whose institutional documents update competing rationalities (technical, pedagogical, and managerial) that reconfigure the meanings of stricto sensu training and shape the projected identity of the educational manager. The findings indicate that this ambivalence reveals the displacements and contradictions constitutive of the training policy in Brazil, particularly in the field of professional master’s programs in education, as evidenced in the institutional discourses analyzed.