A construção social do processo de orientação acadêmica na pós-graduação em Administração

Abstract

In Brazilian higher education, masters and doctors are responsible for teaching in higher education. Scientific literature has suggested that postgraduate studies, as a whole, are based on the academic orientation process. This process is permeated by several understandings that are attributed by advisors, advisees, and the Higher Education Institution (HEI), involved with it. These understandings occur because, although there are institutional suggestions and, on the part of the literature, guidance practices (approaches) that become frames of reference for the conduct of actors, these same practices are traversed by the trajectory of each actor, causing each one interprets reality in a particular way. Questions like these denote that this process has a particular constitutive configuration. In this sense, the theoretical approach of social constructionism proved to be relevant for this work. Here, the object of research is academic guidance in the graduate program in administration and the unit of analysis is the Postgraduate Program in Administration (PGA) at the Federal University of Lavras (FUL). The objective was to understand how the process of academic guidance in the graduate program in administration is constructed. To this end, this research qualitatively addressed the research problem by evaluating the understandings of the actors involved in the process of building academic guidance. More specifically, nine permanent advisors and 17 PGA graduates were interviewed, in addition to the analysis of institutional documents. All collected data were analyzed using content analysis. As a result, it was observed that the training trajectory of current advisor teachers is intertwined with the history of the PGA, in such a way that their current guidance practices permeate a set of practices observed in the conduct of their advisors, when they were still postgraduate students. graduation. With this, these actors create a practice selection filter that helps them to reformulate their “doing of academic guidance”. In addition, it was clear that academic guidance at the PPGA does not have a previously established objective, but, in general, the actors' understanding of this issue suggests that academic guidance aims at training researchers, having less important parallel constitutive elements as, teacher training and citizen training. Additionally, the construction of the academic guidance process encompasses constitutive characteristics assessed as the most important, related to the references that actors use to support their guidance practices and some performance characteristics, related to proactive learning, time organization, feedback, and support in writing and negotiating interests. Additionally, this work presents some considerations about the relationship between academic guidance and teacher education in graduate administration in administration, articulating the understandings of the actors interviewed with the scientific literature. More specifically, it was observed how the academic guidance process can (or not) contribute to teacher education. This work brings institutional (managerial) contributions by providing a set of information that can be used by program decision-makers, especially in their self-assessment. In addition, it brings theoretical contributions, by expanding the field of socio-constructionist research.