Ensino e aprendizado na universidade: a percepção de estudantes em uma perspectiva fenomenológica

Abstract

The increase of access to higher education has brought important new issues that the university was not prepared to deal with. The dissatisfaction expressed by lecturers and students in the university context, invite us to look at the crisis that is getting worse. To understand this question, we need to reflect about the different elements that constitute the problem, highlighting the political, social and economic aspects, but specially, the pedagogical and psychological ones, that can help us to understand this problem. To this end, we (set out to ask) have asked the students of a private university about this experience. We seek to analyze the students’ perceptions about the university (resources and working conditions), pedagogical practices (teaching methods and relationship with lecturers) and their personal and professional expectations as graduates. The research was done in the phenomenological perspective, which seeks an approximation of the lived experience and seeks that the experience be revealed to know it. Thus, 8 students from a private university were interviewed, in two groups with 4 students each one, with the purpose of knowing their perceptions. From their reports, we identified three units of meaning that configure the studied phenomenon: 1) “students’ relationship with the university”; 2) “students’ relationship with lecturers” and 3) “students’ relationship with learning”. The students’ relationship with the university was considered by them as very important, but full of frustrations. They revealed a great dissatisfaction with the structure of the university, with the lecturers’ methodologies, with the demands made by them and with the evaluation system. One of the evident aspects is the business relationship between the education and the “new” profile of the student who is reaching the university. The students’ perception about the university and the learning process touches on the central issues of the university crisis and reveals the necessity of a new university culture, linked to the social context of rapid transformations and indeterminations and with which they can not handle. This is followed by a need of change in the educational paradigm of lecturers to foster a dynamic and meaningful learning that allows the construction of future projects. Discussing the meaning of the university and reflecting about the work that we do as lecturers is an essential process to improve the level of knowledge about our teaching, and about what teach. This is the way for the university can review its role.