Educação superior pública em movimento: compromisso, afeto e luta na Baixada Fluminense

Abstract

This thesis addresses the expansion process of Brazilian public higher education intensified in the last fifteen years, when there was a quantitative increase of institutions and the implementation of affirmative action policies in the admission processes. In order to understand the challenges of university education in the peripheries and the impacts of the decentralization of campuses, we privileged the analysis of pedagogical practices, collective actions and academic productions developed by teachers and students linked to higher education courses in Humanities, Languages and Education in Baixada Fluminense, a metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. The research was based on fieldwork in different academic spaces and interviews with professors and students of the following institutions: Faculdade de Educação da Baixada Fluminense (FEBF) of Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), in Duque de Caxias; Instituto Multidisciplinar (IM) of Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), in Nova Iguaçu; and Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ), in Nilópolis. I observe how the process of expansion and decentralization, with increasing social inclusion, provoques transformations, questions and tensions that affect not only the individuals that access higher education, but also the institutions and the way how tradicionally academic formation has been developed in Brazil. This new and complex educational scenario has demanded pedagogical practices with greater political sensivity, intelectual relationships based on affection and listening and an academic production connected to the experiences and corporealities of those who develop it. This thesis verifies how practices and actions built in university that are commited to local social reality and to the material conditions of students are favorable to the permanency of black, peripheric and working class students, becoming especially relevant in crisis contexts.