Trajetória e êxito escolar de alunos oriundos das camadas populares no ensino médio técnico: um estudo de caso no Instituto Federal de São Paulo – Campus Sorocaba

Abstract

This thesis is a case study investigating the school and out-of-school factors contributing to the academic success trajectories of students from working-class backgrounds in technical high school at the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP) (Campus Sorocaba). The theoretical framework converges Norbert Elias's configurational sociology, Bernard Charlot's theory of the relationship to knowledge, and Jorge Larrosa Bondía's perspective on the knowledge of experience, moving away from determinist readings to apprehend academic success as a dynamic and subjective process. Methodologically, the qualiquantitative research, along with utilizing data from the Unified Public Administration System (SUAP) for an initial filtering, employed three complementary data collection tools: questionnaires administered to 27 students and, following a sample refinement, in-depth interviews and the elaboration of knowledge balances with 13 students, seeking to apprehend, from the interviewees' own perspective, the factors contributing to academic success, as well as the subjects' relationship as co-authors of their learning processes. The longitudinal analysis allowed classifying the trajectories into three macro-configurations: consonant, where domestic practices resonate with school demands; dissonant, characterized by identity tensions propelling self-restraint through refusal or authorized emancipation; and of temporality, marked by interruption processes and by the sense of urgency in the return of adults to subsequent education. Through a cross-sectional synthesis effort, the investigation revealed that the academic success of students from working-class backgrounds in technical high school results from the inseparable articulation between the provision of technical knowledge, conferring practical orientation to life projects, and the construction of a sense of belonging within the institutional space. Such a dynamic is sustained within the configurations of these trajectories, in which the web of prior familial and school functions (predominantly performed by women) has acted and continues to act as a fundamental mediator of self-restraint and the management of expectations. It is within this interdependence that the student finds the necessary support to convert technical training into an identity project, allowing school demands to be assimilated as a guidance process, consolidating success through the stabilization of the webs of interdependence that connect knowledge, school history, and the family. It is concluded that school persistence and success among the investigated working-class groups were sustained through the transformation of external coercions into stable self-restraint. This process was initially enabled primarily by these 'invisible' articulators, which allowed students to resignify the meaning of learning and open themselves to the knowledge of experience that touches, traverses, and emancipates the subjects.