O improvável é sempre possível: o percurso de estudantes do curso de Pedagogia a distância em uma Universidade Federal

Abstract

This research is configured as a field study addressing the persistence of enrolled students and graduates of the distance-learning Pedagogy licensure program offered by the Directorate of Open and Distance Education at the Federal University of the Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys, from 2019 to 2025. In this context, the following research question was developed: which individual and institutional factors influenced the persistence of Pedagogy students at different centers of the institution? In order to answer this question, the study examined whether the distance Pedagogy program fulfills its role in offering and democratizing higher education in the territory under analysis and how student habitus and the accumulation of cultural and economic capital affected the academic choices of students from the popular classes. The thesis defended is that there is a dichotomy in distance education with regard to the access and persistence of students from the popular strata of society, which, in turn, is linked to the forms of expression of habitus and to the accumulation of cultural and economic capital by the social agents who entered the Pedagogy degree in this modality. It is argued that, although income restriction is an element that interferes with access to higher education, considering aspects such as commuting, acquisition of materials, and moving to another city, the possibility of this education being offered at a distance allows people from the popular classes in inland municipalities to access and remain in this educational modality. Thus, the trajectory of students from the Northern, Central, and Jequitinhonha Valley regions of Minas Gerais, linked to the centers of Capelinha, Cristália, Francisco Sá, and Papagaios, was examined. To do so, the concepts of habitus, field, cultural capital, and economic capital as formulated by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu were employed. In addition, the study drew on Vincent Tinto’s model of motivation and persistence and on the method of data triangulation, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, through documentary analysis of regulations, minutes of the Governing Council, records of meetings of the Structuring Teaching Nucleus, and institutional secondary data (socioeconomic entrance questionnaires—number of enrolled students, graduates, and dropouts) produced by the Permanent Selection Process Committee and by the Directorate of Academic Records and Control. Subsequently, online semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students in the program, totaling 12 participants, whose data were treated from the perspective of sociological portraits, a concept proposed within Lahire’s Textual Analysis. It was found that this educational modality enables the acquisition of cultural capital, considering that, in this process of scientific study, a student habitus is being constituted, whether through socialization in internships, virtual interaction, debates in web conferences with professors, or supervision in the final course project. At the same time that it allows access, its dynamics restrict the forms of cultural capital, since the embodied form and the interaction between the agents’ dispositions and the structures of the field are reduced. Thus, the need to increase face-to-face practices at the centers is emphasized, as well as the need for other actions to be developed in the formation of the social/university agent; moreover, despite the dominated condition of the agents under examination, motivation and persistence proved to be guiding factors for student persistence, as well as for institutional actions.