FIRST GENERATION STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHERS ON STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

ABSTRACT

The objective of the article is to analyze the social representations of university professors on the student involvement in First Generation Students of a public university. The First Generation Student is the one who enters the university without his parents having achieved it; in Chile it emerges by the massification, privatization and diversification of the university offer. The study is qualitative and sociologically based. Through structural analysis of the discourse, performative elements of meaning were accessed in three semantic fields: autonomous student; student with instrumental behavior; student who fails. Student involvement appears as an intrinsic condition and failure is attributed to the student. First Generation Students have cultural wealth but require more support to integrate into a culture outside their academic capital. It is imperative to harmonize intrinsic student involvement with modeling the academic imperative and designing inclusion policies.

KEYWORDS
first generation students; higher education; educational inclusion