Percursos singulares : sucesso escolar no ensino superior e grupos sociais desfavorecidos

Study about the course of academic achievement at a university level, of young people who were granted scholarships by a local authority, coming from families with low levels of school education, economical difficulties and non-qualified jobs. Through the assemblage of four biographical courses and from the analysis of forty different scholarship students social processes, one has intended to study the course of academic achievement, aiming to understand the implications of the educational style and familial cohesion thereof, as well as the role played by family strategies in academic achievement (by studying the specific contribution of families and the surrounding environment for the academic achievement of their children), the meanings given by the families and by the young people themselves to the prolonged course of such study life, the subjective relationships established among them through the duration of these courses of success, and the subjective costs of this mobility and the representations concerning the future. As to account for the explaining factors present in these cases of a young people’s school achievement, the following elements are present: an early reading age, a rational estimation of their children’s school course and ascetic family dispositions; a moral order of exactitude within the household, a positive appraisal of the study and academic work, the follow-up of the academic work; a style for a contracted education and the crux role of the mother. It has also been underlined that the parental frustration regarding their own academic aspirations works as leverage for the success of their children, thus allowing the understanding of this phenomenon as part of the generational family cours