Born in Espírito Santo, a city in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte with a little more than 10,400 inhabitants, Maria Rosângela Costa Chaves reaches 40 years old with the certainty that Distance Education was a watershed in her life. She has just joined a Professional Master’s Course in Geography at the Centro de Ensino Superior do Seridó (CERES / UFRN). In the week that we celebrate International Women’s Day, we will tell one more of these inspiring stories that only distance education can provide.

Before talking about this recent achievement, Maria Rosângela recalls the time when she was an academic at the UFRN Center in Nova Cruz / RN: “I worked in two shifts and was the mother of a child, still small, it was impossible to move to the University in the capital and be able to follow the classroom classes ”. She says that she had the constant monitoring of the professors of the disciplines, tutors in person and at a distance, with the opportunity to resolve all doubts.

Rosângela completed her degree in Geography in 2011 and has since pursued her dream of pursuing a Master’s degree. Between one attempt and another, he was collecting specializations in the areas of Environmental Education and Geography of the Semiarid Region (IFRN), Municipal Management of Education (UFPB), Biological Sciences (Faculdade Santa Cecília) and Early Childhood Education and Literacy (ISEP). But the curriculum lacked the Master’s course. When she was very close to achieving this goal, a health problem in the family forced her to postpone the goal.

But, in January 2021, ten years after the conclusion of Higher Education, she was summoned to occupy one of the GEOPROF places at CERES / UFRN: “I know that the GEOPROF Master will be very important for my teaching, I will improve myself, even more , as a Geography teacher, through more consistent pedagogical practices, based on geographic scientific knowledge ”. Doctorate and post-doctorate, after completing the master’s degree, these will be your next steps.

The Assistant Secretary of Distance Education at UFRN, Ione Morais, who is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University, distance learning and a master’s degree, does not hide the pride of the former distance education student: “I would like to highlight Rosângela Costa, a student from the first class of Licenciatura in Geography at Distance from the Pole of Nova Cruz, which today is a master’s student in the Graduate Program in Geography – GEOPROF, an initiative in which I participated in the condition of its creator.

Still according to Ione Morais, being Rosângela’s teacher in this new stage of her formative journey is a reunion that makes her happy and reaffirms the convictions that Distance Education has the power to revolutionize people and places, fulfilling a unique role of spreading Teaching Higher education and to enable the realization of dreams and life projects, which only found the conditions to materialize through technology-mediated education.

Bruno Cássio – SEDIS / UFRN Media Sector.