Inclusão e estigmatização na universidade pública: o caso do PEC-RP no curso de Ciências Sociais da UFCG.

Abstract

In the middle of the debate about the inclusive policies adopted by the Brazilian statesponsored (federal) universities in the last decade there is a question that has not been much discussed: how the social relations inside the universities themselves are affected by these policies, and how these universities have combined projects of affirmative action with measures that allow the effective integration of the students benefited by these same policies in the academic environment. Created at the Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), The Programa Estudante Convenio - Rede Publica (PEC-RP) [The Student - Public School Partnership Program] facilitated the entrance of in-service teachers with an professional practice in public schools-through a simplified university entrance examination-in the undergraduate courses at the Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB) as well as in the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG) which was created as a dismembering of the former in 2002. In the undergraduate course of Social Sciences of the Center of Humanities at the UFCG, the insertion of these students has defined new ways of social relations as well as new social configurations. This insertion has divided the students in two groups: the stigmatized PEC students, and the non-PEC students (students who enter the university mainly through a non-simplified university entrance examination known as Vestibular). This work analyses the process the formation of two different identities among the students in the undergraduate course of Social Sciences, where the majority group (non-PEC students) and the minority group (PEC students) have their images confronted with one another when academic performance is concerned. The representation of the PEC students is charged with negative and pejorative contents that define the ways they relate with the other students as well as the teachers. The games of attributing identities and their meanings that were revealed in the research, quantitative as well as qualitative, allows us to understand how power relations operate in the new social configurations created by the inclusive policies established by the PEC-RP. The problematic insertion of the PEC student in the undergraduate course of Social Sciences at the UFCG and the stigma which is associated with this insertion allows the broadening of the debate on inclusive policies, so as to incorporate mechanisms of accompaniment of the students who are benefited by them after entering the university, thus avoiding that these students join stigmatized minority groups inside the institutions in where they study, a situation that affects the credibility of the policies themselves as well as the teaching-learning process.