FORMAL INCLUSION AND REAL DIVERSITY IN AN ENGINEERING PROGRAM OF A NEW PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

Political measures are being taken to “democratize” access to universities in Brazil. A new State university recently created after a wide consultation to the population, has taken two important measures: (i) it reserves fifty per cent of its places to poor students and ten per cent to physically handicapped ones and (ii) has abolished the departmental structure. The paper discusses the result of a strategy adopted to deal with the highly heterogeneous classes resulting from the first measure and presents a way of taking advantage of the absence of epistemological control by a mathematics department to offer interdisciplinary objects as possible students’ objects of desire.