A transição do ensino secundário para o ensino superior: um estudo no contexto educacional moçambicano

Abstract

Education in Mozambique in structured in learning cycles, education in the form of a spiral. During the years as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education and Human Development (MINEDH), I have worked in all the education subsystems, having verified at some point that secondary school pupils lack information about the functioning of higher education, which gave rise to the theme in allusion, with the aim of understanding the process of transition of young people from secondary education to public higher education. This made it possible to identify and describe the experiences of a transition of groups belonging to different learning environments, although with similar goals, some who were inspiring to enter education and others already entered and faced challenges to integrate into the context of university life. Overall, the empirical data highlighted the lack of dialogue between the two education subsystems. This case study, exploratory in nature, adopted the qualitative method, with an interpretative paradigm grounded in symbolic interactionism and affiliation theory (Coulon, 2008). Data were produced through comprehensive interviews with 15 participants, seven public secondary school students (grade 12) and eight first-year public higher education students. From the discourse analysis (Bakthin, 2007) and content analysis (Bardin, 2011), the results allowed us to identify convergent points between the participants of the two levels of education and other divergent points regarding this transition process related to the expectations and factors that secondary school students experience and expectations of first year students, factors that favor or not the academic and institutional integration. This doctoral thesis is linked to the research group Observatory of Student Life (OVE) and its field is Developmental Psychology and studies on youth of colonized countries. The results of the research point to the need to create a bridge between the two levels of education in order to facilitate the transition and to establish communication between public secondary and higher education institutions; to create welcoming policies for students recently enrolled in higher education; to reverse the scenario of inefficient state policies in providing quality education for all and; to influence and implement effective practices that involve all the actors that act in this context in Mozambique.