Idosos na educação de jovens e adultos: desafios e motivações no processo de escolarização

Abstract

What motivated the present study was the interest in knowing the difficulties, challenges and motivations of EJA subjects, after getting to know the EJA modality better during the pedagogy course and awakening a great interest in the area. After delving deeper into the area and seeing the invisibility that exists for the elderly in the area of educational research, curiosity and interest in researching them emerged. This work has the general objective of analyzing the main challenges and motivations of elderly EJA subjects in the schooling process. Four specific objectives were stipulated for this work, which are: Characterizing the elderly subjects of EJA and their right to education; Examine the main challenges encountered in the elderly person’s school life journey; Identify your main difficulties in the schooling process; and Investigate the motivations that lead elderly people to currently join EJA. Using a methodology cataloged as qualitative, through the characterization of descriptive research, carried out with data collection during an interview with a structured questionnaire with 6 elderly students, enrolled in Cycles I and II of public schools in the city of João Pessoa-PB, it was carried out an analysis of the main difficulties and challenges that these people encounter or encountered when they decided to return to the classroom and in their schooling process, in addition, the motivations that made them seek the classroom again or for the first time, as reported by a participant. Bringing the theoretical contributions of Brasil (2003), Pereira (2011), Evangelista (2021), among others, so that we can give visibility to this topic that is so important but so little commented on. Since, from the data collected in the research, it was possible to identify that the main difficulties that prevented their schooling process at the so-called regular age are related to child labor and the challenges that elderly people currently face in the schooling process are related to their physical and cognitive conditioning, such as tiredness, difficulties related to vision and memory, in addition to some other factors mentioned such as unprepared teachers and the diversity of the class. As motivations to encourage the search for school, what predominated in response was the long-awaited completion of studies, some personal factors such as being able to read the Bible and still trying to get a driver's license, in addition to a long-awaited entry into higher education.