Science without Borders – An alternative framework for evaluation

Resumo

This paper proposes a tentative methodology to critically evaluate some aspects of the first phase of the Brazilian international higher education mobility program called Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science without Borders SwB) on its undergraduate scholarship share in Canada. The data to be analyzed come from the first Calls (108/2012-109/2012), and three of the monitoring tools designed by the program administrators:  the immediate, straightforward data available on the Painel de Controle and  Bolsistas pelo Mundo sites (prepared by the program administrators themselves) and expanded with the further information provided (or not) by the students in their Lattes CV (an electronic standardized record of academic life). For this study, we selected the total of 522 students who were placed in the five Canadian universities which presented the largest number of SwB undergraduate students all through the first phase, spent their period abroad and returned to complete their courses in their home universities in Brazil at least 21 months before – at the time data were collected (January, 2016). Our understanding of educational policies is in line with The Policy Cycle Approach (Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992).  The concept of ‘disposition’ (Dewey 1992; Andreotti et al. 2015) will be used as a framework for a critical analysis of the attitudes students have related to updating their Lattes CV, which is here understood as a tool that enables accountability to stakeholders.