Among dreams and cunning attitudes: relationships with the academic knowledge of university students

Abstract

Due to the expansion of university access in Brazil in the last decade, a change of the student profile took place. In order to look into the matter, the present text reports a case study on ten Brazilian university students and their relationships with knowledge, based on Bernard Charlot’s theory. Questionnaires, “inventories of knowledges”, interviews for data collection were used in the attempt to understand the different types of mobilization for higher education, the meaning of academic knowledge and its value to students of Economic Sciences, Social Sciences, History, Geography, Social Work and Psychology. Three types of mobilization processes for academic activity were categorized: processes of subjects who wish to acquire a profession, processes of empirical subjects and processes of epistemological subjects. Common to all of them is the planning of long-term academic pathways, which will ensure them higher living standards and/or social mobility.