Remade tutorial policy: contexts and relationships to think about educational word at the university

Abstract

This article presents an analytical description of the development of the Workshop of Methodology of Studying. This workshop is one of the forms of tutorials at the National University of José C. Paz. Based on an etnographic stand and a conception of policies as a historic everyday process, the work documents interaction both among students themselves and between them and the educational tutor. At the same time, it registers atmospheres while activities are accomplished and ways by which the tutor elicits student working with the contents. The research was carried out from an etnographical stand, with participant observation as the main methodological strategy and anthropological interviews in a lower degree. The article shows the way the tutor elicits student working by putting herself as someone who, just as expected from the attendants, had to get trained with techniques and tools to approach academic texts. At the same time, the author puts forward that this way of working is structured on relationships developed between students and tutor that go beyond the scope of the workshop. From a deeply relational conception of educational work, the tutor should be active not only as concerns the workshop itself: by sharing other spaces with her students she can get to know certain situations allowing her to advise them to attend other spaces offered by the university, according to the particular need she might discover in each student. A situational production of commitments additionally results from this dynamic. Therefore the article puts emphasis on the need of keeping on documenting everyday doing of the actors taking part in this process, by carefully registering all kinds of practices, without getting them invisible under “screen practices” (Lahire, 2006). In short, the question is understanding policies and different ways of tutorials as “living process” (Fernández Alvarez, Garztañaga y Quirós, 2017).