Percursos de jovens de escolas públicas de ensino médio e profissional no programa de iniciação científica júnior da UFMG

Abstract

The Scientific Initiation Scholarship Program for high school students at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), known as Provoc na UFMG and developed from 1998 up to 2011, aimed the integration of high school students from federal and state public schools and research programs at UFMG. More than 500 students and 300 researchers were part of this program. Such coverage brought young people from different social groups into the realm of the university, enabling the encounter between high school students, middle level professional and undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers from different fields of knowledge at UFMG. Through the methodological principles of oral history we could rescue what students, researchers-counselors and coordinators of the participant schools from 2007 to 2009 retained in their memory regarding their expectations and experiences before, during and after the Provoc na UFMG experience at UFMG. We aimed to analyze the paths of socialization and sociability of the high school students who participated in the program, during the mentioned period. More specifically, we have sought to understand the motivations and expectations for the future before entering the program, the experiences, the motivated for learning in research environments and the social, intellectual and emotional impacts resulting from the interactions in this program. We used the sociability and socialization categories as theoretical references of analysis to understand the experiences of students together with the research group. We reconstructed the subjective trajectories of the interviewed students and we analyze the contents of the reports as proposed by Dubar (1998; 2005). We expect that the data which was generated in this study can contribute to reflections, reviews and improvement of similar programs at UFMG as well as to interaction with schools and other related entities which also develop proposals for initiation scientific research for young people in high school students and professional education.