Education and teaching practice: an analysis of teachers from higher education courses at the Federal Institutes of Brazil and Polytechnic Institutes of Portugal

Abstract

The construction of the appropriate professional profile for the tourism sector, if it wants to meet the new demands and expectations of the world of work, will require the development of essential skills in future professionals, as well as a trainer capable of responding to these challenges. It is the objective of this research to analyze the new ways of organizing work and the necessary meta-competences for the qualitative renewal of the professional profile in the hotel, restaurant and tourism area. As a basis
for understanding this problem, a comparative case study between Superior Courses of Tourism offered by the Federal Institutes of Brazil and the Polytechnic Institutes of Portugal, whose field research took place between the months of October 2015 to April 2016 And involved about 70 teachers (from both countries) and 25 institutions from Brazil and Portugal. The main conclusions point to many similarities observed between teachers from both countries, especially with regard to the didactic procedures used, the curricular matrices, the composition of the teaching staff, the number of students per classroom, the degree, the Gender, the age group of the teaching staff, among others. However, some discrepancies between the two groups deserve special mention, such as: the weekly workload of teachers in their educational institutions; The authorship of the discipline plans and, above all, the specific scientific production and participation in scientific events in the area, in which the percentage of Portuguese teachers represents more than double the percentage of their Brazilian colleagues. Regarding the challenges in teaching practice in tourism courses, it was observed that in Brazil as in Portugal, there are no inescapable difficulties. Among the greatest difficulties, from the perspective of teachers, is the deficient educational base of their students. Although there has not yet been much research on the problem of teacher education in higher education courses, it is possible to affirm that the development of an initial and continuous training action or even the elaboration of a platform for dialogue specially designed for teachers of these courses, you should always consider the perspective of interdisciplinarity.