Práticas sociais e estratégias de estudantes de meios populares rumo à Universidade Pública

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the social practices and the construction of the school trajectories of students belonging to the popular classes who attended the Integrated High School (IHS) at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology North of Minas Gerais - Advanced Janaúba Campus. We focus on trying to understand the cultural capital of these agents who have the same origin and occupy the same social position at a given time and in the same field, despite their individualities. In a universe strongly marked by multiplied inequalities (DUBET, 2001), we aimed to understand how students, who apparently had a lot of deficit of origin cultural capital, get enter public universities. Thus, this study was based on Bourdieu and his theory of cultural capital to build an epistemology of the students' social practices based on the experiences they lived during the three years they were enrolled at EMI, as well as those experiences they emboied in their trajectories before to accessing the institution. Bourdieu's relational epistemology was the theoretical-methodological wich used to apprehend the objective relationships that structured the students' social world and the relationships established between these agents. The focus group was the empirical research, instrument chosen to know the social practices of student agents. Subsequently, we theoretically based on authors who belong to Sociologies of the Individual, such as Danilo Martuccelli and Marc Henry Soulet, to explain the processes of socialization and individuation of these students. From this discussion, we understand how individuals with histories strongly marked by inequalities and with a a lot of deficit of cultural capital of origin, build very peculiar processes of individuation, circumvent the present and the alleged predictability of their destinies, build strategies of desiring action and reach the higher education, contrary to predictions. In this phase of the research, we carried out comprehensive interviews to understand how the students' individuation processes were built at the heart of the structural dynamics of social life. Thus, at the level of individuals, we aimed to understand the experiences of mismatches between subjectivities and the objective conditions of existence and how these experiences may explain the improbable success trajectories of these students belonging to popular milieus. The results showed how these students acted and overcame obstacles, mobilizing resources and looking for reasons that motivated their actions in the form of objectives that showed them the possibility of moving forward. Aware of their cultural disadvantages, they had to perform within a social environment endowed with elasticity, which puts into play the idea of malleability that allows explaining how some behaviors and interactions can be carried out successfully despite a considerable number of failures, of misunderstandings, inadequacies collected throughout the lives of these individuals. In addition to social determinisms, we believe it is possible to demonstrate a more optimistic posture which launching new possibilities for reflection on the relation between inequalities and school performance, besides unveiling new sociological variables to possibilities for individual actions.