Trajetórias de estudantes universitários de meios populares em busca de letramento digital

Abstract

In the environment of Education, mainly in what refers to college education, knowing how to use the internet and its vast possibilities is a daily need. However there are college students, specially the ones who come from financially disadvantaged social layers, who do not know how to deal with computer resources neither with the internet resources and need immediately to get into university and respond to its virtual demands. The College of Education at UFMG, the location where this study took place, was also the scenery for the following questions: what digital culture has been evolving in its campus? How have the IT excluded novice students developed strategies to respond to the internet demands in the academic world? In order to answer these questions, it was necessary to do a research of longitudinal features, over a period of two years (2007/2008). At first, we wanted to find out what the instituted discourse in regards to the new technologies at the university and at the College of Education is. Secondly, we selected for the researchthe financially disadvantaged students, who do not have a computer or do not know how to use one. So that we could do this, we applied a questionnaire of social and financial features. The analysis of the data obtained had as its focus, the history of the entrance of the subjects in the digital world and presented some peculiarities of the environment where this research happened in regards to a local digital literacy process. We found out that although there is certain spontaneity in dealing with theissues related to the previous digital literacy of the students, the local digital culture is incipient and reveals a series of problems and difficulties. The main authors who guided us in this research were: Bernard Lahire and Pierre Bourdieu because we grounded ourselves on a sociological perspective to understand the behavior of the subjects before the demands of the digital world so that they could get into the academic world; Brian Street, David Barton and Shirley Heath helped us discuss the aspects related to the practices and literacy events inlocal contexts; Magda Soares and Carla Coscarelli backed us up with the concepts of digital literacy. This study has also as its theoretical support the results of the researches of the Committee of Management of the Internet in Brazil (CGI).