Representações sociais acerca do Programa de Tutoria da UFRN: contribuições à integração e permanência de estudantes no Ensino Superior

Abstract

Among the various teaching programs that exist in the field of undergraduate studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), our research is focused on the Tutoring Program. This is a teaching program that offers support to groups of students with low academic performance, prioritizing new students and seeking to consolidate their adaptation to higher education. In this context, the teaching projects that make the Tutoring Program a reality are composed of teaching staff, technicaladministrative staff and undergraduate students in their operational teams, having undergraduate students as their target audience. Given that it is one of the most recently implemented teaching programs at UFRN, institutionalized in October 2018 and currently being expanded, we identified some pertinent questions. What is the participants' social representation of the Tutoring Program? How does this representation interfere in the achievement of the program's objectives, especially with regards to the perspective of integration and permanence of students in higher education? To address our research questions, we adopted a theoreticalmethodological framework aimed at analyzing the social representation of the UFRN Tutoring Program held by the participants. In the course of the research, we established relationships with the objectives of tutoring, examining how its execution, procedures and understanding of the program itself have been operationalized. The methodology used consisted of literature review and field study, adopting a qualitative approach. From a theoretical-methodological point of view, we employed the Social Representations Theory (SRT), which seeks to analyze a social phenomenon or object from the collective angle, based on authors such as Moscovici (2003) and Jodelet (2001). From the empirical point of view, we used the Word Association Technique (WAT), questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and reflective groups as data collection tools. For the analysis, we used the Central Core Theory (Abric, 2000), Content Analysis (Bardin, 2011) and the Representational Spiral System (Melo, 2024). As a result of this investigation, it was possible to learn about elements of the participants' representations and conclude that they see the Tutoring Program as an instrument to help in the teaching-learning process and to welcome students into higher education, despite some discrepancies observed as a result of the anchoring process. These findings allowed us to provide a critical analysis at the way the program was run and propose the construction of a guide. As such, we seek to contribute in order to enhance and improve the Tutoring Program, thereby making the integration and permanence of students in higher education more and more feasible.