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The Graduate Program in Letters (PPGL) at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), established in 1987 by ordinance 1484/86, was one of the institution's first master's degree programs and first in northern region of Brazil in area of Linguistics and Literature. Our areas of concentration are mixed and combine studies in linguistics and literature. Since 2013, we have been offering master's and doctoral programs. Currently, the PPGL operates in an exclusive four-story building located on the Guamá Campus in Belém, state of Pará. It is the only one with a grade of 6.0 in the northern region in the last four-year evaluation (2017-2020).
The PPGL UFPA currently represents the main reference for Graduate Studies in area of Linguistics and Literature in the Amazon, a vast, heterogeneous region whose borders go beyond Brazilian territory. The region is made up of a plurality of subjects. According to the latest IBGE census (2022), the Brazilian Amazon alone is home to more than 17 million inhabitants, spread across large and small cities, large and small rural properties, riverbanks, indigenous lands, and quilombola remnants.
MISSION AND OBJECTIVES
The history of the present of the Amazonian populations, their transformations and linguistic, literary and cosmological diversity, intensely present in the Program's actions, are intertwined with the asymmetries of the processes of colonization and globalization of knowledge. In this sense, the mission, challenges and achievements of the PPGL are in line with the main mission of UFPA: “to produce, socialize and transform knowledge in the Amazon to educate citizens capable of promoting the construction of an inclusive and sustainable society.”
The General Objective of the Program is to educate highly qualified human resources in the Area of Linguistics and Literature, committed to building an environmentally sustainable planet, who respect ethnic-racial, gender and religious diversity and contributes to the reduction of economic and social asymmetries.
Specific Objectives are:
a) to make visible the different language realities of indigenous populations and traditional communities in the Amazon, the language policies in which they are involved and their possibilities in the contemporary world.
b) to broaden the academic debate on the challenges of education in Portuguese-speaking countries, problematizing the concept of Lusophony.
c) to problematize the epistemologies that guide research, extension and teaching activities in the field of language studies with a view to respecting local knowledge, without disregarding the global perspectives of knowledge production.
d) to encourage research with different perspectives on orality, with its educational, intercultural and intermedial possibilities, considering the knowledge and power relations in which they are involved.
e) to promote research in linguistics and literature in the northern region, acting as a partner in the consolidation of other programs, in the elaboration of policies for the development of higher education at regional, national and international levels.
f) stimulate the national and international circulation of knowledge produced in the region, encouraging the mobility of students and faculty through partnerships with established and consolidating national and international research centers.
g) Encourages research, teaching and extension activities committed to diversity and the inclusion and retention of people historically excluded from higher education and postgraduate studies in Brazil.
In period 2021-2024, our research, extension and teaching actions sought to be guided by the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations
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and by the 03 adjacent goals proposed by the Brazilian Government
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Self-assessment
The four-year period began under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes and activities only returned to in-person classes at the beginning of 2022. In 2021, we are still living under the effects of the pandemic, and the death of a professor and two students from the Program left a very negative trail that deeply affected the mental health of everyone involved in the postgraduate program. There was no way to think about self-assessment processes. The only activity that year took place at SEPA – Seminar on Ongoing Research, which is mandatory for students to complete their curricular program. But at that time, even the assessment of the work was compromised.
Since 2012, the Office of the Vice-Rector for Research and Postgraduate Studies at UFPA has been making efforts to ensure that its Postgraduate Programs are monitored by an External Consultant, but since 2020 we have been out of this Monitoring Program. In the second half of 2022, when the board began to redefine the activities for the next four years of this four-year period and to point out the need to reformulate the curricular matrix of the two courses, the coordination began working to hire a consultant again.
After resolving the bureaucratic obstacles, we were able to count on the presence of the consultant in person in the second half of 2022 and in the second half of 2024, when meetings were held with the coordination, professors and students of the Program. After the first meeting, after all the people involved were heard, the Board began working on the curricular reformulation, which includes the elimination of mandatory subjects in the master's and doctorate programs, reducing the number of subjects in the master's program, which was 05 subjects of 60 hours and went to 04 subjects of 60 hours. We created two new lines of research focused on indigenous peoples, one in each Area of Concentration, we created new subjects, including 30-hour subjects, and updated those that remained in the new curriculum. These changes were implemented in early 2023.
After the CAPES Midterm Seminar, in October 2023, all programs were instructed to form permanent self-evaluation committees. At PPGL, we created three committees for this purpose: Self-Evaluation Committee, Extension Committee, and Internationalization Committee, all composed of faculty, student representatives, alumni, and technicians. The work of these committees presented its first results during the 1st PPGL Social Impact Seminar, which was attended by the coordinator of the Linguistics and Literature Area and took place in September 2024.
The self-evaluation stages that took place in the second half of 2024 served more for planning for the next four years, since we had already reformulated the program in 2023. We are, therefore, on track to evaluate the positive and/or negative impacts of these changes in 2025 and 2026. The committees will be maintained permanently and will act on this next stage.
With the inauguration of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, the direction of national science policy will be redirected to further enhance the social and economic impacts of postgraduate studies in the country and will now be guided by the UN's 2030 Agenda. This is a global plan that aims to achieve a better world for all peoples and nations by 2030. To this end, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were proposed in 2015, as well as specific targets to achieve each of them, such as reducing inequalities and hunger. The Brazilian government will propose three adjacent goals: SDG 18, which deals with Racial Equality, SDG 19 on Culture and Communication, and SDG 20, which deals with the Rights of Indigenous Populations and Traditional Communities. The three additional SDGs originate from the “SDG Seal for Higher Education Institutions” initiative, which will be produced by several universities around the world. In 2023, the Working Group “Impact of Brazilian Postgraduate Studies on the 2030 Agenda” was created within the scope of CAPES, due to the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change – COP 30, which will be held in November, in the city of Belém do Pará. The objective of this WG was to generate a document that represents the effort of the National Education System to propose the inclusion of three new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), incorporating into the agenda a concern of the so-called Global South, composed of Latin America, Africa and Arab countries. The WG led by Professor Carlos Sampaio (FURB), is made up of the 50 CAPES Knowledge Areas, in addition to representatives of the National Association of Postgraduate Students (ANPG) and the Forum of Pro-Rectors of Research and Postgraduate Studies (FOPROP).
Since the Midterm Seminar, postgraduate programs have also begun to plan the inclusion of these goals and their targets. Many of these objectives were already present in our practices.
PPGL Self-Assessment Committee
At the collegiate meeting on April 2, 2024, it was decided that the PPGL self-assessment committee would be constituted as follows:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Massao Fairchild (president)
Prof. Dr. Germana Maria Araújo Sales (teacher)
Marcos da Silva Cruz (student)
Herodoto Ezequiel Fonseca da Silva (graduate)
Igor Gonçalves Chaves (TAE)
The committee decided, at this first moment, to use two self-assessment instruments: sending forms with multiple-choice alternatives to teachers, students and graduates via email and holding hearings with the same audience.
Committee meeting schedule
09/05/2024 – review of the last PPGL evaluation
11/06/2024 – review of the CAPES evaluation form
20/06/2024 – planning of strategies for collecting information from graduates and meeting with students
14/08/2024 – review of the results of the information collection on graduates
06/09/2024 – review of CAPES documents on the self-evaluation policy of PPGs
18 and 19/09/2024 – hearings with PPGL students
23/09/2024 - Presentation of results at the 1st PPGL Social Impact Seminar
08/12/2024 - Presentation of results at the 21st SEPA
AFFIRMATIVE POLICIES
Historically, indigenous and Afro-diasporic populations, as well as LGBTQIAP+ people, have been excluded from the Brazilian regular education system. In the early 2000s, when this situation began to change, a series of demands and laws culminated in the Federal Government's Affirmative Action Policy for Undergraduate Studies at public universities. This initially guaranteed the admission, retention and success of indigenous, black and disabled students. However, the political transformations that began with the 2016 Coup and the election of Jair Bolsonaro did not allow these rights to reach postgraduate students. The resumption of this process, since President Lula took office, requires improving achievements in undergraduate studies and facing the challenge of ensuring space for these populations in the training of highly qualified human resources. The presence of these historically excluded students in universities, combined with the emergence of social movements in Brazil, today requires new forms of Affirmative Action Policies, in addition to the necessary infrastructure to receive them. Curricular frameworks need to be revised, especially the content and methodologies based on the interiorization of their languages and knowledge, and we have already made significant progress in this regard. It is necessary to strengthen the mechanisms for diagnosing these asymmetries and, above all, together with these students and their societies, promote actions that favor epistemic justice within our universities.
We are witnessing on our globalized screens the failure of Western models of progress and development, which are leading to the exhaustion of the planet's natural resources. In Brazil, research needs to find new paths, new epistemologies and respect the multiplicity of knowledge coming from indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples. We need to build other possibilities within universities and transform them into multiversity.
We need, in partnership with the UFPA administration, to establish affirmative actions committed to language policies, and this also involves deaf students, whose presence requires sign language translators and interpreters - TIL. In 2023, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office warned the PPGL to reserve places for deaf students, since the quotas in our student admissions notices were only for indigenous and quilombola people. This motivation led us to accredit a qualified teacher to work with these students, but this does not solve the shortage of TILs, who were excluded from federal administration positions under the Jair Bolsonaro government.
In 2024, the Federal Government approved the Law on Affirmative Action Policies for Graduate Studies, but it has not yet been defined how they will actually work. CAPES created a series of research calls for proposals to find ways to implement these policies. At PPGL, we are writing a new Bylaw in which these policies will have a specific chapter, and our student admissions notices since 2020 already include quotas. In the last Notice of 2024, for student admissions in 2025, we included quotas for people with disabilities and trans people. UFPA still needs to define its affirmative action policy for Graduate Studies, despite having already created scholarship notices with quotas and always supporting initiatives committed to these actions, as was the case with the reformulation of the PPGL curriculum.
The last four years have been full of achievements for PPGL, but there are still obstacles that need to be resolved. From both an infrastructure and epistemological perspective, this dialogue with UFPA’s senior management is valuable in many ways and greatly impacts the intellectual output of our students. It will certainly become even closer and more fruitful in the next four years.