O exercício da gestão universitária: as representações sociais de professores sobre suas práticas

Abstract

The object of this research is the social representations of the teacher/manager on the exercise of university management activities. Such exercise is not attractive and can represent a factor that hinders the development of the teaching career in the dimensions of teaching, research and extension. There are fragility and scarcity of guidelines and problematizations regarding the profile, selection, work conditions and organization, training and succession of professors who exercise management. This context glimpsed the following questions: What motivates the professor to want (or not want) to occupy a management role at the university? What do you need to know to be a university manager? How do they learn and how do they work in management? How do they reconcile teaching, research, extension and management activities? What are the professional trajectories of these teachers/managers like? Such issues and contexts justified and mobilized the investigation on screen that aimed to identify, analyze and problematize these social representations from the analysis of teaching work, the interaction between formal and informal prescriptions, identifying how they are constituted, apprehended and socially shared these elements present in the work of the teacher/manager in the context of the IFES. Therefore, a qualitative research was developed with 06 department heads at UFRN from 2017 to 2019, based on the Theory of Social Representations with support from the Activity Clinic and Content Analysis, documentary and bibliographic research, semi-structured interviews and application of the technique of Instruction to the Look-alike. After analyzing the data collected in the light of the theoretical and conceptual matrix adopted, results were obtained, which were organized into two categories: poor management and well-done work. In precarious management, it was evident that the teacher's work in university management is something alien, strange, disturbing and, above all, not part of teaching; it is exercised with training gaps that cause professional insecurity and, above all, it intensifies the precarious process of teaching work in federal universities. On the other hand, in the category of work well done, the possibility of expanding the power of action of these teachers, the creative capacity and satisfaction in building and learning collectively were included. However, there is a need to improve the training processes and the working conditions of teachers/managers.