A educação superior na EaD no processo de reintegração e reajuste social dos encarcerados no Ceará (2023-2024)

Abstract

Education in prison is often overlooked by society, which does not recognise these individuals as subjects of rights. Therefore, due to multiple paradigms that permeate prison education from the perspective of the neoliberal and conservative capitalist order, this thesis, part of the State, Policies and Education Management research line of the Postgraduate Programme in Education at the Federal University of Uber-lândia (UFU). The general scope of this study is to examine the structural and peda-gogical challenges of higher education in the Distance Education (DE) modality for the social reintegration of the prison population in Ceará, from 2023 to 2024, through the following specific objectives: a) to discuss the social configurations of the Brazilian prison population; b) to unveil the implications of neoliberalism in the dismantling of social public policies; c) to analyze the structural and pedagogical challenges for the applicability of education in prison as a tool for social rehabilita-tion; d) to describe the impacts of DE higher education on the professionalization and resocialization of convicts and the reverberations of neoliberalism in social pub-lic policies, especially those concerning DE higher education for the prison popula-tion; e) to investigate the paths, gaps, impacts, and contributions of DE higher edu-cation for the resocialization of prisoners in Ceará. Specifically, the methodological design was based on bibliographic, documentary and empirical research, using data triangulation to synthesise the results and contributions of the research, through the approval of the Research Ethics Committee for the semi-structured interview, in per-son, with eight higher education students from the Luciano Andrade Lima Provisio-nal Detention Centre and the Professor Olavo Oliveira II Prison Unit. On the other hand, we noted that the lack of a suitable environment for the questions to be asked individually hindered the flow of the interviews. The discussions and analyses were guided by Freire's philosophical concept, finding that in Ceará, the right to higher education in prison is being implemented only by private institutions, in the form of distance learning.Therefore, to ensure greater inclusion in higher education, we believe that SAP should establish partnerships to offer public higher education to this segment. In short, we argue that there are major gaps to be overcome in the pro-vision of distance learning higher education for prisoners in Ceará, due to the lack of qualified human resources for this issue; a lack of partnerships with public insti-tutions; and a lack of planning between the prison and the institution offering dis-tance learning, given that virtual learning environments (VLEs) do not allow access to videos, digital dictionaries, applications, and other resources relevant to the tea-ching-learning process.In fact, students never had contact with tutors or teachers, summarising their studies with the exclusive support of handouts made available on the platforms. In view of the above, we describe the contributions and possibilities of distance learning higher education in terms of the professionalisation and resociali-sation of convicts, hoping that this study will contribute to new reflections, opening up paths to (re)think higher education in prison as a strategic, democratic and inclu-sive tool, providing access to all social strata that for some reason have lost their fre-edom to come and go, but not their freedom to learn, even becoming individuals with the aptitude, skills and competence required for insertion into the games of interests of contemporary capitalism.