Avaliação da implementação da política de ações afirmativas: prospectando as travessias dos estudantes quilombolas na UFBA

Abstract

Affirmative action policies in the past two decades in Brazil represent an important advance in expanding the access of black, indigenous and other minorities students to university. The movement of racial and social democratization in the country is quite old, but it only obtains more assertive political-institutional outlines starting from the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988, which starts to guarantee the Brazilian population access to broad social rights, including access to an education of quality. However, as of the Reuni Program, created in 2006, affirmative policies aimed at guaranteeing the expansion of university for the hitherto excluded population, especially underrepresented ethnic minorities, are now integrated as mandatory measures for all Instituições Federais de Educação Superior - IFES. Aiming to contribute to deepen this debate, the general objective of this study was to evaluate the process of implementing the affirmative action policy at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) with an emphasis on the perspective of the crossings experienced by quilombola students. In theoretical-historical terms, the research sought support in the broad literature that has discussed affirmative action policies in Brazil, considering both the material perspectives (which guarantee quilombola students to remain at the university) and the symbolic issues that have direct and indirect reflexes in the learning process and the quality of higher education offered. In methodological terms, this is a qualitative research, with an exploratory-descriptive character, with emphasis on the UFBA case study, which used as a database both documentary analysis and the conducting of semi-structured interviews with managers and coordinators of selected courses. While the documentary analysis made it possible to identify the advances in the affirmative action policy at the university studied, the interviews made it possible to recognize the perception of the actors interviewed about the limits, the challenges and the perspectives of the organizational-administrative and academic-pedagogical capacity of the courses for the effectiveness and quality of the analyzed policy. In order to expand the analysis capacity based on the history of UFBA, the experiences of Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB) and Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), public institutions that have also assumed a relevant role in quota policies in Bahia and Brazil, were integrated into the study. As the experience of a program visitor, a mandatory activity of the master, was managed to observe an international experience of social inclusion policy in university, emphasis was given to the report of the Universidad de La Plata, an Argentine institution. As relevant results of the research, the following can be highlighted: (a) comparative analysis of the experience of implementing affirmative action policies in four public universities, three nationals and one international; (b) the perceptions of the managers and coordinators of the collegiate bodies of selected courses on the advances, limits and challenges of the implementation of the affirmative action policy at UFBA; and (c) the drawing of an assessment tool for the quilombola students' perception of the social inclusion process that access to the university has made possible. These products reflect the relevance that this training brought, by enabling the researcher to develop theoretical-analytical, contextual and empirical skills on the subject studied, in addition to contributing to qualify her professional practice as a UFBA servant, working in the graduation pro-rectory. In summary, it is believed that the results achieved can help in the (re)definition of academic-pedagogical strategies that prepare IFES to better meet the needs of quilombola students and other minorities who are entitled to university.