CULTURAL DIVERSITY AT UNIVERSITY: SOME MECHANISMS THAT OPERATE IN THE SHAPING OF CULTURAL IDENTITIES

Abstract

The representation of 1st year students about their cultural capital and identity and how they construe their knowledge by starting different courses at advanced levels, whether at university or not, was the established research problem.
Regarding the methodological framework, we made participant observations and semi-structured interviews to 1st year students from the Bachelor’s Degree in Health Education and Bachelor’s Degree in Social Communication programs of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. These instruments allowed us to start the survey and systematization of the information about what students understand by knowledge, the reasons for choosing the program, the factors having an influence in the production of knowledge, the relationship between their personal interests and what the University offers. It is a hermeneutic methodology, i. e., an interpretation process that constantly relates the texts (interviews and verbal expressions registered in the observations) and their specific context (spatial-temporal).
This data are relevant when reviewing our Department proposals so that the latent cultural diversity in the classrooms is respected; to do that, we need to modify the processes of differentiation that operate on the students constituting violent experiences and even heartbreaking for the personal and family backgrounds due to the unequal distribution and, hence, acquisition of different kind of capitals. This situation is legitimated by the institutions since the community of graduate students dominates society by means of knowledge and classifies it according to the cultural capital accumulated. We think that in Bourdieu and Foucault we can find some explanations about the social dynamics inside the educational institutions characterized by the tensión between habitus and field that shapes the cultural identities.