Juventudes nas universidades: uma revisão sistemática da literatura

Abstract

Is the university an environment for young people? Considering the age parameter established by the Youth Statute, it can be affirmed that it is. The question then arises: whether Brazilian scientific studies addressing youth in universities, beyond knowledge and curricular structuring, investigate these people's relationship with the university and its daily implications. Considering universities as physically and symbolically plural environments and youth as a relational category, constructed from a historical and social perspective, a systematic review of Brazilian scientific production is proposed. The general objective is to characterize, descriptively and analytically, scientific research in Brazil on the relationship between youth and the university environment, with special attention to research in the field of education conducted with young people about the challenges of university life; and specifically, to identify articles in Brazilian academic production that simultaneously address youth and universities. characterize the identified articles according to year of publication, journal qualifications, geography of production, leading universities, field of knowledge, general themes, and types of study, highlighting those that conduct research with young people while also addressing youth-university relations; and analyze the general characteristics, methodological procedures, main themes, and approach to the university of studies that conduct research with young people while also addressing youth-university relations and are linked to the field of education. A systematic literature review was conducted with a quantitative and qualitative approach, based on a search on the Google Scholar platform using two groups of descriptors: 1) youth / youth / young / young people and 2) university / universities / university life / university environment. The words should appear in the article title, in imultaneous pairs composed of one word from each group. The search stage was termed exploratory. The material returned by the platform was processed in three more stages: mining, refinement, and analysis. Of the 171 articles returned, 84 addressed the relationship between youth and universities in some way. The peak of publications occurred from 2018 to 2022, accounting for almost 55% of the production. Most of the first authors were affiliated with universities in the Brazilian northeast (28.4%) and southeast (27.4%) and the field of education (34.5%). Studies conducted directly with young people make up the majority (~70%), and of these, 29 actually discuss the experience of being at university, what demands are mobilized, and what reflective potential they reveal. Of the 18 areas of knowledge mapped from these 29 studies, those with the highest number of articles were: education (9 articles ~31%), sociology (7 articles ~24%), and psychology (5 articles ~17%). A preliminary analysis of the nine articles related to education highlights an interest in issues related to difficulties and strategies related to access to and retention in university; self-development as a means of understanding the meanings attributed to university life in conjunction with their needs and reasons for developing their lives and educational activities; and participation and protagonism, problematizing the construction of subjectivity and protagonism by young university students.