The entrance to the university: involved epistemic, social and identity dimensions. The case of new students to the Bachelor of Systems at the National University of Río Negro

Abstract

This article analyzes the vicissitudes that new students of the Bachelor of Systems at the National University of Río Negro (UNRN) go through in their relation with knowledge. The research specifically sought to: reconstruct the image of themselves as learners of the students who participate in the study and how it was (re) configured in the first year of the career; identify the knowledge and intellectual activities that were demanded of students and those that they gave greater significance and, finally, reconstruct the social relations and the institutional framework in which the relationship with the students' knowledge was situationally constructed. It is qualitative research that triangulates sources (teachers, students, documents), techniques for collecting (in-depth interviews, balances of knowledge) and for data analysis (qualitative interpretive analysis). As a result, it can be seen that the University supports and proposes a new “institutional relationship with knowledge”, which puts in tension the forms that up to that moment the students have built. This institutional relationship with knowledge implies: a new learning subject, a specific temporality, new educational actors and new figures of learning privileged. It also shows how entering the university is a moment where the image of oneself as learners is shaken.