The labyrinths of university class

Author(s)

Guilherme Torres Corrêa

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2016-11-04

Examining board members

Maria Isabel de Almeida; Selma Garrido Pimenta; Dermeval Saviani; Maria Inês Galvão Flores Marcondes de Souza; Alda Roberta Torres

• Advisor: Maria Isabel de Almeida

Abstract

The aim of this research is to comprehend the university class in its multiple determinations, mediations, contradictions, and dimensions, especially for it setting up as the privileged space-time of educational process\' realization at the university and for being a relatively naturalized object by individuals of the field of university pedagogy, which has being constituted as a field of practice, formation and research on teaching in higher education. Insofar as this field has built its trajectory on a tendentiously reformist direction, it was identified the need to know and propose components for boosting a humanizing, critical and revolutionary pedagogical praxis. Therefore, it was used an ethnographic research based on historical materialism. Data collection took place in five disciplines, one in each of the five selected undergraduate courses (Licentiate Degree in Physics, Civil Engineering, Pedagogy, Architecture and Urban Design, Plastic Arts) at the University of São Paulo, with a total of 240 hours of classroom observations and interviews. Fieldwork highlighted class as a complex, dynamic and contradictory phenomenon and submitted, among other things, to institutional bureaucracy, to fragmented curriculum, to capital pressures, to different demands of the students, to different pedagogical intentionalities, to reified organization of space and time, to precarious teaching work conditions, to naturalization of the forms of production and mobilization of bodies and affects in educational process, and to (un)meetings of the subjects of this process and their trajectories. Based on the discussion of the data, it was realized that, within the educational process, teachers and students need to establish: mediated and non-daily relations with scientific knowledge; otherness; qualitative relations in and with time and space; and transgressive body relations. From this, it has listed four components for boosting a humanizing, critical, and revolutionary pedagogical praxis: critical, alterity, creativity, affectivity. It was concluded that beyond the need to build a larger movement that intends to establish a new hegemony in university and higher education as a whole, it would be up to the individuals of the university pedagogy field, in its circumscribed sphere of action, to act inspired by the four listed elements, especially in class, where, despite all the constraints, there are still possibilities for the exercise of teaching autonomy. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/18706-4 - THE LABYRINTHS OF HIGHER EDUCATION PEDAGOGY: notes about an interdicted class
• Grantee: Guilherme Torres Corrêa
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate