Work-in-progress: Consolidating engineering education discipline at Polytechnic School of University of São Paulo

In Brazil there are some research groups and individual researches working on Engineering Education. There´s even a national event named Brazilian Congress of Engineering Education, even so the Engineering Education research is not recognized as a discipline or as a research area. There are no Engineering Education departments inside the Engineering Schools, there are just small teacher training courses to improve teaching skills and to develop educational material and some Ph.D. and M.S. students working on this area. It´s very difficult raise funds to foment research projects in Engineering Education because the Government´s Departments of Education and the Development Agencies do not recognize this discipline. The University of São Paulo (USP) is one of the most important Universities in South America and the idea is to propose the creation of the Department of Engineering Education at Polytechnic School of USP also to help the consolidation process of Engineering Education as a discipline. We hope we could inspire other Brazilian Universities to do the same. This work (presented in this paper) is still in progress and it´s part of a Ph.D. research.