Estudar é um ato de resistência: sofrimento psíquico e aprendizagem na universidade à luz da teoria histórico-cultural

Abstract

At the same time that university is configured as a space for professional training and development of critical subjects capable of understanding and intervening in reality, it has also been presented as a space for the production of psychic suffering for students. In this context, the present study aims to know and to understand the relationship perceived by students in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability regarding the relationship between psychic suffering and teaching-learning processes. It is characterized as a bibliographic and a field research, guided by the theoretical-methodological framework of historical-cultural psychology, which is based on historical-dialectical materialism, being its reference matrix. Empirical data were produced by conducting focus groups with university students in a situation of socioeconomic vulnerability. These data were synthesized into three categories of analysis, namely: personal sense; teaching-learning processes; and psychic suffering. The results indicate that the meanings of being a university student are related to the student's identity, the possibilities of personal fulfillment, the expansion of expectations for the future and the creation of a meaning for these students' lives. Among the reasons for the professionalizing study activity, professional training and the appropriation of scientific knowledge can be observed. However, it is highlighted that, when senses and meanings of this activity are not coherent with each other, there is a split between them, which, in turn, produces changes in consciousness and personality. The activity, losing its meaning, may result both in the non-appropriation of scientific knowledge and in the production of psychic suffering in these students. In the case of teaching-learning processes, it is observed that the ways and conditions in which the study activity takes place are crucial for learning and development to happen. However, when these processes do not materialize, they result in the non-appropriation of knowledge by students. Thus, it is perceived that both non-appropriation and ways and conditions that structure this activity may be producers of suffering. Psychic suffering, in turn, is related to a socially and historically constituted phenomenon, whose genesis is found in production relations, in the context of a liberal capitalist logic, impregnated in the web of social relations that constitute human beings. Suffering, by producing alterations in the personality structure, implies changing needs and hierarchy of motives, losing meaning and decreasing self-control of behavior, bringing significant implications to the teaching-learning processes. Such considerations make it possible to understand that both the teaching-learning processes – due to the way they are structured in higher education and which may imply psychological suffering in university students – and the psychic suffering – in relation to pathological changes in personality, when modifying the needs, motives and interest – interfere with the activity, harming the process of appropriating scientific knowledge made available in higher education.