"Ser alguém na vida": a relação entre sentido pessoal da atividade de estudo profissionalizante e permanência na educação superior

Abstract

This doctoral study, affiliated with the Research Line Knowledge and Educational Practices of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia, analyzes the process of constitution of personal meanings attributed to professional study activity and its implications for student retention in higher education among students supported by the Student Assistance Policy. The topic is situated within the context of the expansion of access to higher education in recent decades (REUNI, Quota Law, and SISU) and the challenges arising from neoliberal logic, which undermines public funding and devalues public education in Brazil. Grounded in Cultural-Historical Psychology and the historical-dialectical materialist method, the research is based on the understanding that the constitution of individual singularity is produced under objective conditions of existence. Using a qualitative approach, the study conducted semi-structured interviews with four students supported by the Student Assistance Policy, addressing issues related to their life histories, schooling processes, and insertion into the world of work, both before and after entering higher education, as well as their perceptions of study activity, higher education, and student assistance. The analyses reveal that understanding student retention requires revisiting these trajectories, in which the motives for study activity are articulated with the living and working conditions experienced by their families and by the individuals themselves. From the contradictions they face – particularly regarding the position they occupy within the current social system as members of the working class – we identified the production and reproduction of a meaning of higher education as a process that enables social mobility, as well as the constitution of personal meanings linked to overcoming existing conditions and/or fulfilling family expectations. Regarding the development of professional study activity, we infer that it is also related to the material, pedagogical, and symbolic conditions experienced within educational institutions, which structure students’ lived experiences during this period of life. In this context, the Student Assistance Policy may constitute a fundamental mediating instrument for the effective realization of the right to higher education. Finally, it is argued that student retention in higher education must be conceived beyond the logic of capital, in order to ensure the material, pedagogical, and symbolic conditions indispensable to the omnilateral formation of human beings and, consequently, to the full articulation of the contradictory unity between professional study activity and students’ productive activity in higher education. Otherwise, there is a tendency toward the reproduction of exclusionary processes within educational institutions and the consolidation of an alienated form of education subordinated to the interests of capital.