Evasão escolar na educação superior: percepções de discentes

Abstract

This research discusses the school evasion phenomenon from the student’s point of view and aims at identifying the causes of such process in the undergraduate course of Computer Engineering. By doing so, the present research also aims at understanding the cultural process of the identity construction in the learning stages, and the students’ interaction in the university environment as well as its possible connections to the evasion process. The study of such process is based on studies of Knechtel (2005), Cevasco (2003), and Woodward (2007), who highlight the multicultural aspect of the education. The importance of the organizational culture and of the guiding maps of the reformulation of the student’s identity are studied according to Freitas’ (1997) and Velho’s (2004) perspective. The studies of Oliveira (2011) regarding the so-called Generation Y help to contextualize the student in question. This paper then keeps on highlighting both the cultural and the dialetical character of the relationship between identity and the educational processes, as suggested by Rego (2010), Candau (2000), and Vieira (2002). Based on the theory of Marchesi and Pérez (2004), it is assumed that both school and teachers are responsible for understanding and also for fighting this phenomenon – such thesis is reinforced by Libâneo (2003). The mentioned theories guide the interpretation of the data collected from questionnaires, to which both surveying statistics analysis methodology and a graphical analysis were applied. Data on the academic system were also collected. Thus, the possible causes of the evasion from the Computer Engineering Undergraduate Course of the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, campus Curitiba, are presented and may be divided into social, pedagogical and psychological issues. The conclusion is that the traditional speech on the evasion process is only a partial one, because it only focuses on the economic factor. The understanding of such phenomenon, however, requires a look at both the individuality and the subjectivity of each student.