Políticas públicas e docência na universidade: novas configurações e possíveis alternativas

Abstract

The text discusses education of university teachers. It relates to some factors which contribute to the lack of prestige of the pedagogical knowledge among teachers of higher education. It takes the idea of habitus, in the sense given by Bourdieu, in order to explain how the professor repeats processes and strategies of teaching and reproduces values strongly present in his trajectory, perpetuating, very often, a cycle of reproduction. The idea of habitus remits to the comprehension of an action not always reflexive, but deeply rooted in the daily way of life of the subjects. It analyses how this condition is permeable to external influences, which reveal the profile of success for the professor. It points out the public policies as a strong element that acts on the configuration of teaching and, among them, the impact that the State’s evaluating processes is exerting in this direction. It takes two structuring dimensions of the doing of the university professor as an object of reflection: research and teaching. It discusses the prestige of each one of them in the context of the academic career. Recurring to the concepts of regulation and emancipation, it states that the processes unleashed by the evaluating function of the State have reinforced the regulative dimension, which provoked crisis, contradictions and possibilities.